


The Progression

by brokenmemento



Category: Grace and Frankie (TV)
Genre: Angst, Confusion, Developing Relationship, Eventual Happy Ending, Eventual Romance, F/F, Falling In Love, Friendship, Pining, Slow Burn
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-25
Updated: 2018-04-22
Packaged: 2019-02-06 17:16:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 10
Words: 34,835
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12822267
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/brokenmemento/pseuds/brokenmemento
Summary: Grace’s relationship with Frankie is ever evolving. This is a look at that change, from imagined preludes to an examination of it through the series.





	1. The Prelude and Beginning of the Beginning

**Author's Note:**

> This was meant to be a series of small snippets or incidents within their life, per chapter. Some of them turned into a bit longer moments because I felt like it helped to advance the plot or worked compatibly with an emotion that was set up during the series. As always, feedback is appreciated. It's been 5+ years since I have attempted a fanfiction, so I apologize for my missteps and stumbles. I'm trying to present as accurate a characterization as I can though.

She’s born on the heels of war, which somehow will prove a fitting metaphor for her life later on. When everything will seem like a never ending battle and smoke filled dream.

Affluence ebbs into her life in her wealthy Connecticut village, a tent pole for the mold from which she is expected to uphold. When she’s just old enough to get a grip on her own body changing, she’s thrown into a school that takes that mold and mashes young girls into the matriarchal figureheads they’re supposed to be. To be the prim woman that any man would love to have on his arm and in his bed. To birth children, propagate the species while having a warm fruit pie in the oven and a pair of pearls around her neck.

You always carry yourself as lady to the world, they tell her. And with her back straight and spoon delicately gripped between her fingers, she looks around at the other girls  in the same place she is. For a bitter second, staring into the contents of her soup tureen, she thinks to herself what bullshit this all really is. She dreams of a life where she doesn’t click her heels on hardwood floors going to a room filled without warmth or personalization every night. Where she isn’t encouraged to put on a facade the world will see because that’s what a ‘lady’ should do. Somewhere between the brown liquid and gleaming metal of her spoon, she stuffs it all down and comes to a decision. That she can do anything she tells herself. That she can be whomever they want her to be. Be the person the world is supposed to see.

Time passes, four years of the same droning societal conform, and she loses herself in the routine of it all.

So when she becomes a Hanson, she does what every good girl should, née what every proper wife should. She latches on, plays the part, forgets she was anyone but. She builds an empire around this person she’s supposed to be, never once stopping long enough to realize she’s drowning. That she’s all alone in an ocean and no one is there to help her but herself.

She does what she’s supposed to do: finish. Finish the quarter with the highest statistics Say Grace has ever seen. Finish her career at the top, handing the reigns to Brianna while she is still in her prime, finish her marriage with a man whom she’s never sure she loved in the first place because that’s what life has taught her. To finish the things she’s began with poise and grace. She finishes everything, even if she has no fucking clue where the real finish line is.

—

“What the fuck,” she hears someone murmur behind her. Not exactly loud but not low enough for the type of function they’re at either. It startles her and she turns around to see a blur of hair and flowing fabric. She rolls her eyes and straightens her posture, death gripping her designer handbag under her arm.

“Hello, Frankie. Whatever brings you here to the PTO gathering?” She says coolly, as if there is a standard to which the organization upholds. As if the diabetes inducing spread on the table before her for the annual bake sale are artisanal cakes made in the South of France.

“Well, the P part mainly,” Frankie shoots back sarcastically, delivering a Saran wrapped item to the table with a thunk. She folds her arms and gives Grace one of the fakest smiles she’s sure she’s ever seen. This observation coming from a woman who has perfected the art over the years. “What gem have you delivered to our prestigious school function? Cookies shipped in from the finest pastry chefs? A decadent spread from one of the top chocolatiers in the country?”

“It’s a sweet bread from the most world renowned bakery in New York City...” she splutters out.

“Hence my “What the fuck” earlier. This is a middle school fundraiser, Grace. The best this place has probably ever seen are dirt cups with gummy worms or homemade cupcakes that are lopsided, yet edible. You worry too much about appearance. You don’t think every single one of these woman threw something together for the sake of necessity?” she explains, holding Grace by the elbow, dragging her through the throngs of bodies milling about.

The touch unnerves Grace, just as much as the person delivering it. She tolerates Frankie, sometimes less if she’s being honest. They’re not friends, even though their families spend and innate amount of time together due to their husbands being business partners. She smiles politely at luncheons and dinners with the Bergsteins, plays hostess when they arrive with their children, finds small talk to pass the time at social gatherings for the firm.

She and Frankie do not touch. Especially not to be in this close proximity. Not to the point where she can feel the warmth of Frankie’s fingers curling around her arm, gentle yet firm. She notices the peculiar scent of her, a mixture of something she can’t quite place even though it’s her career to know such things.

As she’s being lead, she takes a rare look at Frankie and notices the smooth expanse of her skin and the wavy flow to her hair. Frankie, if given some direction for once in her forty plus years of life, could be breathtaking. Grace stammers a bit at the intrusive thought and let’s herself be pushed into a nearby corner, shoulder brushing against Frankie as she turns to face the crowd, resting there as if it’s the perfectly natural thing to do.

The room feels like it’s caving in, the slight pressure of Frankie’s arm pressed against hers and she panics. Says the only thing she can think of.

“And, pray tell, what vegan nightmare have you donated to the cause?” Instead of moving away from Frankie, she feels their shoulders press more firmly against one another and she begins to feel faint. This woman, this infuriating woman, is NOT reducing her to rubble.

Frankie laughs and leans against the wall, turning to face Grace full on and disconnecting their shoulders. She just stares at her, not saying a word, and Grace feels herself becoming even more unraveled.

“Okay, what the hell are you looking at?” Grace angrily whispers, letting the veneer of perfect housewife and mother slip.

Frankie’s lips twitch at the corners, pulling into a small smile. Her arms are crossed and her posture is aloof, yet Grace has never felt more exposed. Frankie leans in to Grace’s ear, her breath tickling her profile. This is too much, Grace thinks. Too damn much. What kind of game is she playing?

“I’m wondering how much fun you’d actually be if you let go and weren’t stuck up and boring as shit,” Frankie murmurs.

Grace turns her head, shocked. There she is,  _ too _ fucking close, and they’re practically nose to nose. The people in the room disappear and the noises dim. It’s as if life has been reduced to a pinprick of an existence. She feels heat creep along her neckline, grateful for it to be hidden by a crisp collared shirt and blazer combo. She can’t let this woman see her undone.

Before she can process, she feels Frankie’s body leave her space and watches as she weaves through the crowd, beating a hasty retreat. Grace can do nothing but grip the wall and try to remember how to breathe.

—

“Congrats, roomie. I’d offer to throw a celebratory seance and trippin' balls life experience for you, but I’m not sure you’d appreciate the gesture,” Frankie says as they exit the realtor’s office.

Robert and Sol walk ahead, all smiles and shaking hands to solidify the acquisition of their new beach front property. Their  _ shared  _ property. The thought sends an angry shock through Grace.

“No, no. This is a business investment. Something to be an asset in the future. We are NOT becoming roommates. Not today, not tomorrow, not ever.” Her tone catches on the ever and she herself flinches at its delivery.

“Ease up, Grace. This could be a nice getaway for our families. We could have holidays at the beach with the kids, cook outside and fly kites. Get away from the hustle and bustle of the city and just enjoy Mother Nature and our lovely, albeit a tad overpriced, business investment.”

Grace stops in her tracks, stepping in front of Frankie to block her path. Frankie’s eyes narrow and she looks at Grace head on.

“Is this some sort of power play? I know it’s kind of your thing and what you do but I’ve calculated many moons ago how to upend you, Grace Hanson. You wouldn’t last a second against me.”

This is not what Grace had anticipated, even further from the idea she actually had for stopping their forward progress to begin with. She wants to be shocked and leveled but she finds herself seething instead.

“Do you realize that for the last fifteen years, you have been, in one form or another, telling me to ‘ease up’? Quite frankly, it’s getting old.” The irony of her word choice isn’t lost on her either.

Suddenly, there Frankie is again in her space, breathing her air. She’s not shrinking away from Grace like most of humanity does. She meets her toe to toe, eye for eye. For a moment, Grace begins to wonder if this is precisely the reason she hasn’t objected more strongly to every foolhardy idea and shenanigan Robert has proposed with the Bergsteins. She questions if she thrives on this, on the confrontation Frankie gives her. It’s certainly not like Robert puts up much of a fight ever, hardly summoning the lazy interest in her anymore.

A perverse thought enters her mind and sticks like hot tar. Robert hasn’t touched her in ages and she knows, deep down, she’s starving. As much as she’d like to pride herself on appearing to not need human connection, she craves it on the most basic of levels and maybe even deeper than she’d like to admit. Maybe this constant push and pull, this verbal give and take with Frankie Bergstein, is filling her up in a way Robert refuses to do anymore and which she rarely does to herself. It feels guilty, to notice this and silently bask in it. To get off on the idea that maybe, somehow, she can find a way to top this woman metaphorically.

“You’re still stuck up and boring as shit, Grace,” Frankie responds breezily, as if Grace hasn’t tried to strike an imposing figure for the last few minutes in front of her.

She brushes by Grace and meanders to where Sol and Robert stand. Tucking her tiny form into the easy going Sol’s, Grace watches as he weaves his arm around Frankie and holds her with a shit eating grin on his face.

As she approaches Robert, who makes no move to embrace her, she feels a stab of jealousy and isn’t quite sure to whom it’s directed. There’s a new beach house to fill the void though.

—

When she walks through the door, she finally, FINALLY, thinks maybe this hellish nightmare is receding a bit. It’s not like she and Robert had the romance of the century, but she’s got feelings for God’s sake and the ache in her chest is very real. Maybe not because Robert was the love of her life or even a love in her life. Perhaps it’s solely for being alone in a world full of people. Whatever the cause, she’s not fully aware. She just knows she  _ feels _ . And it fucking sucks.

The beach house seemed like the quiet and solitude she longs for but there, in the middle of the damn dining room table in a smoky sage haze is Frankie. It takes everything in Grace not to scream.

She says some hateful shit because she’s particularly good at it and watches Frankie stomp off out the back doors to the beach. The last thing she plans on is following her, ever seeking her out on purpose.

Now the sand is soft but firm under her palms and she gazes into the horizon feeling like she’s lost a bit of herself. The waves crash and recede, auditory ambiance in her ears. She feels like melted goop, a marshmallow overheated in a microwave too long. The peyote has to be out of her system by now but she wonders if this is a side effect of it all. Not giving a shit.

Frankie moves beside her and the anger that she felt earlier, the rage of being thrust into this crappy situation for the indefinite crappy future with a woman she’s never understood and likely never will, leaves her completely.

“I recall about fifteen years ago offering to provide a ball tripping, life altering experience for you. Who knew you’d ever take me up on it,” Frankie muses.

“Inadvertently,” Grace responds because would she have willing done peyote with Frankie? She highly doubts.

Frankie’s musing sparks something within her. A long forgotten memory of standing in front of Frankie, antagonizing her to the point of being able to feel something, anything. Of how happy Robert and Sol had been to obtain the property they now sit upon. She almost smiles to herself to think of them losing it for their sex trysts, even if it is a shared victory with her ex-husband’s husband’s ex-wife.

“What a trip though, man” Frankie murmurs in reverence, perhaps lost in the dying effects of the peyote as well.

“Yeah, roomie. What a trip.”

Because that’s what they are now, despite the protestations Grace would like to give. Watching a seagull take a dive into the water, she finds solace in this quiet moment with the least likely person she’d ever thought she’d be with.

She’d say it almost feels full circle, but she doesn’t believe in any of that.


	2. The Middle of the Beginning

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For this chapter, soft M? Or maybe Strong T. Either way, I don't think it warrants upgrading to "M" yet but I wanted readers to be warned, in case you tend to avoid such things.

It should be normal for them at this age, to expect people to die and move on to….whatever, but the thought of it all still unnerves Grace. Not because she’s afraid of dying, no. To her, it’s more like a travesty that she is having to start over in her 70's when this part of her life should have been smooth sailing and relaxation. Hadn’t that been why she retired, letting Brianna take the reigns of the company?

Surely there is more to life than standing in Frankie’s studio, waiting on her convicts to leave so they can show up to a wake on time. She knows Robert and Sol will be there, showing off their relationship for all to see while Grace has to enter and receive whispers and side glances with Frankie Bergstein trailing her.

“Oh, poor Grace,” they’ll say. “It looks like they just traded partners.”

When instead she’d rather their tongues fall out of their mouths at her shapely figure, about how poised and utterly radiant she has tried to quaff herself into being. She wants to leave bodies twitching and writhing in wonder behind her.

Under no circumstances does she want anyone to think she and Frankie have fallen to each other in solidarity, a pang of irritation and something else coursing through her at the idea. She’s spent her life trying to tolerate Frankie and now she’s been forced to live with her in the ever wilting years of her life. If there had been any other option, literally any, she’s sure she would have taken it by now instead of sitting out on the beach hallucinating and vomiting from muscle relaxers and peyote.

The whole situation seems fitting when it boils down to it though, like some sort of pay back or injustice for all the grievances Grace has surely made others experience for most of her life.

The list piling and stacking up around her as she flits here and there, seeing faces and speaking to people whom inundated her old life, but don’t seem to have much desire to continue to remain a part of it since her marriage is all but as dead as Larry.

It’s like Grace is on the outside looking in now, a spectral being which people seem to remember but lack the drive to focus on. When she finds Robert sitting in a back room, she lets everything seep over the edge and spew out.

“You get to be happy. You’re not losing anything,” she tells him.

He’s got a person to be beside him at night, their old friends and his well paying job. Yes, she “gets” the beach house, but is it really worth it in the long run when he’s sitting around eating a quaint supper with their children a mere seven days after she’s had to reconstruct some semblance of an existence?

“That’s not true,” he replies, something in his voice she refuses to hear because of how wronged she feels.

She launches into a soliloquy about what’s changed for her, what she doesn’t have and what she will never have again. Grace can feel her mouth overloading, but she doesn’t censure it.

“And all I get is stuck with Frankie,” Grace tells her ex. Suddenly the very person she’s glued to is behind her, appearing as if the mention of her name has summoned her into being. She breezes past Grace, moving at a surprising clip for a woman in clogs.

When she sees Frankie climbing into the old Studebaker, Sol’s expression flabbergasted, Grace feels a pang of that stabbing guilt again. For many things but namely for uttering what she did about Frankie, for being selfish and thinking she is the only one coming undone from the whole divorce ordeal.

As she watches Frankie exit the car in sudden realization, Grace can’t help but think that maybe, just maybe, she and Frankie are in the same sinking boat.  
——-  
They say that before life ends, before the final bow out of every living breath you ever took, that your life flashes before your eyes. A movie reel of all of the good and bad and messed up shit that either happened, or didn’t.

So when she feels herself falling, flailing without any real hope of being caught, it’s no surprise that Grace’s film is mixed with all of the pent up aggression, regret, anxiety, and loneliness that her life has been full of. It’s all the things she’s failed to see before now, a lucid dream/nightmare that she can’t seem to wake herself up from.

It’s so vivid, she can feel the pain in her hip and the rage coursing through her as she listens to Frankie rattle off her meds like she knows her, knows the ins, outs, and subtle intricacies of Grace’s life.

The picture keeps on lurching forward, projecting every cursed thing that could happen. Robert’s already left, but then Brianna is leaving too. And when she’s been shitty enough, the sharp barbs lancing out from her mouth, she watches Frankie depart as well. Solitude slams into her and she sees, finally, what all of it can get you-the deflecting, and extending out and away to be untouchable and unmarred. It leaves you alone.

The waves lap and take her under, metaphorically of course, but all she can feel is the approaching sense of doom and dying alone without anyone to really care whether she’s around. But then, driftwood. Concrete touch, no longer an abstract longing. No longer drowning but being pulled to the surface, mercifully, by a helping hand.

When Grace’s vision clears, it’s Frankie’s face she sees and nothing in her can feel bitter about it. Because she’s not dying or dead after all, with Frankie firmly holding on to her and keeping her grounded.

“I almost died!” she exclaims.

“You almost fell…” Frankie begins but then Grace’s arms are around her, pressing her as close to her as she can get.

She feels the ridges and curves of Frankie and holds on for dear life, whatever’s left. It says a lot that when everyone else had left and disappeared, Frankie dutifully remained. The last person in her farcical life who should have stayed but did. To save her from something uncategorized, lacking definition, endless in its existence.

Tears form in her eyes as she listens to it, all thrown back into her face as if she hadn’t watched it play on her eyes for what felt like forever as she felt reality slipping. Frankie, above all of the muck and destruction Grace is capable of forming and shaping, lumps herself under the word “friend,” something that as time progresses, Grace isn’t sure she has an adequate definition for anymore.

“Like it or not,” she hears Frankie say.

And when she says that yes, she does too, it’s as close as she’s felt to not being alone in the last forty years. Maybe, just maybe, she can let Frankie be this for her. Maybe she can learn to be it herself.  
—----  
It’s a process, at times a very difficult one. To try and rebuild after what feels like total destruction. Each person who weaves in and out of the fabric of her day seem to be applying another stone, a little mortar, constructing the life she is supposed to have.

That’s why Grace lets them come, to hold her up and fill her out even when it really is just about giving to herself, seeing if she is still capable of emotion and feeling. Maybe she wants to wreck a bit of havoc and play the game instead of getting played for once. It’s the role she plays with Guy, the electricity from Byron enough to jolt her and remind her that beneath her chest, a heart is still beating. She is alive and her life can be as vivid as she makes it.

The male spectrum of interaction keeps Grace in control. Of course being in charge is a powerful feeling, something she has thrived on throughout her life. It’s those slivers and morsels of control that she devours greedily and awaits for more to come.

Then there is Frankie. The opposite of poise and Grace. The roommate-yet-could-be-friend who brings Grace to the ledge of trust and friendship but who somehow manages to always yank her to and fro, teetering precariously on the boundary of acquaintance and something more.

A part of Grace would like to have another woman to discuss the cluster than her life has become, the steady flow of masculinity traipsing through the beach house. Frankie’s mouth is constantly unhinged though and even though Grace knows she’s the least private person in the world, a chagrined part of her had hoped Frankie could fulfill the something in Grace’s life that has been missing.

When the VHS slides across the arm of the chair, at first Grace is taken aback. Frankie so willingly offering this mortifying secret. Even though the conversation meanders away to other topics, the idea lodges in Grace and she can’t let it go. A curiosity killed the cat scenario if ever there was one.

“While I appreciate you sharing this latest tidbit with me, I feel like I can’t ignore the elephant in the room you presented,” Grace says holding up the tape, circling back to the beginning of an earlier conversation.

“Are you saying you want to watch it, Grace?” Frankie’s tone contains a lilt of amusement, not the previous embarrassment that was detectable.

It’s going to be odd, there’s no doubt about it. Watching a porn video was never part of her relationship with Robert, much less anyone else. To experience this with Frankie is going to be unique, to say the least. Grace is also partially afraid of what to expect out of this ordeal. But damnit, the idea is in her head and she can’t shake it. So yes, she is going to agree to this madness.

“Do we even own a VCR? They are antiquated technology at this point,” she offers, making it seem like a dodge but really offering a challenge.

“Funny you should ask. I happen to have one in the studio, possibly buried under some other items as part of an art- deco piece. It may or may not still be fully functional,” Frankie offers with the raise of an eyebrow.

The next few moments seem like treading through molasses. Grace feels her feet moving, following Frankie through the studio doors, feeling Frankie lead her to the couch, watching her drag over a small tv and retrieving the VCR covered in paint and glue.

Grace’s palms sweat in fear, guilt, and ultimately anticipation. Part of her feels like a pervert for going back to this while the other part lies in waiting, ready to devour. She wipes her hands over her jeans, grabs the side of the couch to calm her anxiety and still her facial expressions.

The screen flickers to life, slightly grainy but still distinctive enough. Involuntarily, Grace licks her lips.

“What do you know. It still works,” Frankie offers.

“Yeah,” all Grace can mumble because on the screen is Frankie, several years younger and in the most figure hugging outfit Grace has ever seen her in. A far cry from her smocks, clogs, and piled upon layers.

The brown skirt is short, hitting mid thigh. Sloping downward are surprisingly in shape legs, muscle definition visible here and there. The straps of her sandals wrap around her calves like vines. A belt sits sideways on her small hips, cinching her waist in tight. Above that, her breasts are defined in the fabric of the toga, a line of cleavage evident. Within Frankie’s hand, she holds a short sword and small shield. Her hair is in delicate waves, no hint of gray yet.

Grace sees Sol in his own version of the Roman getup, but Frankie is the main one in focus. The one that’s in front of the camera. Sol stands behind her as they passionately kiss, Frankie’s back to the screen and hands gliding up her ribcage. Her short skirt leaves little to the imagination.

“Oh, jeepers, it’s all coming back to me. How we got to this point in the night. Damn Sol and his rugged handsomeness,” Frankie yaps.

Grace can only nod, feeling like a voyeur as Frankie is pushed into a nearby table, her sword being lost in a clatter to the floor in the process. The cup to her toga falls down by Sol’s clawing grasp, and Grace has to swallow. She sees the way the air hits her nipple, how it puckers and gets tight.

This shouldn’t make Grace’s breath hitch because oddly, she’s seen this part of Frankie before. So bold in their first meeting that the other woman had lifted her shirt and bared this intimate part of herself so freely for inspection from Grace’s eyes.

She’s glad Frankie has continued to ruminate through the course of events appearing on the screen. Maybe it will mask the little noises Grace seems incapable of restraining despite the odd familiarity of the sight.

Grace jumps as Sol spins Frankie around, the shield scraping against the table as he bends her over both objects. This is becoming too much, too much to experience for the first time with a person Grace was just contemplating the intricacies of friendship with mere hours ago.

While she can’t see any part of Sol, who remains mercifully covered, she can see a lot of Frankie. The swell of her right breast is pressed against the shield, in plain view. Her legs and the now curve of her posterior are on full display as Sol begins to move, moans escaping Frankie from under him.

It’s all so fucking ludicrous, her prostrated on that shield while he holds his sword high in the air and makes his own guttural noises. But somehow, somehow, it’s having more of an effect than Grace is comfortable admitting, would ever admit.

Sucking in another breath as if her lungs have popped and are unable to inflate, she stands up and beelines to the VCR, punching the stop button with vehemence and vigor. Her skin feels hot, aflush with emotions she’s not sure she can begin to process.

“I think I’ve seen enough,” Grace stammers.

“Don’t get me wrong, it’s not going to win us an AVN award or anything. The porn industry is so fickle these days. But for the 80’s? We might have been on to something,” Frankie suggests.

“Maybe this should go another twenty years without viewership,” Grace tells her. Looks at a new painting nearby, a plate with aging vindaloo on the far table, the ground with paint splatters resembling a Jackson Pollock. Anything other than Frankie’s face.

Grace keeps her head down but lays a gentle hand on Frankie’s shoulder for a moment, then beats a hasty retreat to the main house as fast as her legs will take her. Away from whatever she just put herself through. Away from something that feels too dangerous to experience again.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ***I Tumblr lurk and comment every now and again. I needed a way to end this chapter and the tape idea fit so perfectly. So credit goes to lilbexi for that. It was not my original thought, but I wanted to play with it.


	3. The End of the First and Starting Again

If anyone had told her she’d be wearing ripped jeans and a T-shirt, hideous makeup, and a less than put together hairstyle while dancing on a bar next to Frankie, she’d have had them committed. Most likely declared clinically insane if said person had also told her she would ask for it, practically beg Frankie to let her attempt anything that could lift her spirits. She’d even left the house without a bra, for God’s sake.

It’s weird how friendship works, she thinks. Not so long ago, even categorizing Frankie as such would have been foreign, a thing she had spent practically her whole life avoiding. It’s been progression, sometimes functioning at a lurch and other times seeming to propel forward, their interactions with one another. It seems fitting to agree to this as Grace lets her fingers weave a pattern on Frankie’s skin, tickling her arm in another attempt to boost morale.

The night is warm and somewhere in the distance, the sounds of San Diego pulse and thrive around them. Here though, no cars pass by on the deserted street and the street lights flicker low, creating a serene ambiance despite the high likelihood that they good be mugged or worse at any second.

All that seems to matter is this, of Frankie and the relaxed look on her face, drifting into some memory Grace could only begin to touch. It’s comfort, a level of living that has been out of arm's reach for so long.

“At some point, calling that cab might be a nice idea. No rush though. You’ve managed to send me to a pretty sedated plane without the use of my normal purple haze,” she sighs dreamily. “Man, Hendrix was on to something.”

“Hendrix also died popping too many sleeping pills, taking 18 times the suggested dosage,” Grace rebuttals. Frankie looks at her as if she’s an alien and would have never been able to pick Hendrix out of a lineup in the first place. Too cultured and full of opera in her ears to have been actually paying attention in the 60’s.

“What? I know things,” Grace defends.

“Maybe we can share a memorial joint when we get home and listen to a little ‘All Along the Watchtower’ while we watch the night creep along. Seems like a good way to cap off a Say Yes agreement.”

Grace removes her fingers from Frankie’s arm, looking down at her phone. She’d meant to get on calling that cab but when she sees the time, it stops her. Like a bubble has been popped, a spell broken. Her phone flashes 12:32 regretfully. She shows it to Frankie who lets out an annoyed breath.

“I promise. If I ever choose to smoke the pot, I’ll do it with you. You can hold me to it,” Grace assures. She’s not one for drug usage, recreational or otherwise. And really, it’s just a little weed when it boils down to it. Perhaps it’s why she’s never protested too much to Frankie’s indulging in it.

Grace also realizes had this come up thirty two minutes ago, she’d have had no choice but to partake.

“Normally I like to seal off my promises with a nice kiss,” Frankie tells her.

Grace feels her pulse speed up, a frantic lurch curling around every nerve ending she has. No, she can’t be serious. Can she?

Frankie must register the panicked look on Grace’s face because she lets out a hearty laugh.

“A kiss to the forehead. It’s what I used to do with Coyote and Nwabudike, when they were young boys. It always seemed to comfort them, to show them I cared and I had their back. It’s something that’s stuck with me all of these years. I’ll let you slide tonight though, since you were so uncharacteristically you in suggesting getting out of the house and not balking when I asked you to tickle my arm. You’ve paid your friend debt until at least…” she ticks off numbers on her fingers. “Mid next week.”

“Mid next week? After all I’ve said yes to?” Grace sounds dumbfounded.

“You had a lot of shit you were in the hole for. Consider this this break even and tallying up point. Congratulations, Grace. I think we’ve reached a milestone in our relationship.”

“How about I finish it off with that call to the cab?”

“Finally. My hips and ass are really screaming for a couch cushion right now.”

Grace smiles and reaches for her phone again, ready to move them off into a new adventure, a new day.  
****  
All of the events begin to add up to Grace, whether Frankie notices them or not. These little moments between them, and even the not so little, stack to make one of the only solid things in Grace’s life. She’s doing things she never imagined she would in her seventy years of life and it’s both odd in the sensation and staggering.

She’s used to constructing walls around her heart, her body, her mind, giving people hints of things that compose the life of Grace Hanson, but to let them in would be a monumental mistake. The repercussions seem unending, so she has always tried to keep a hand up and her bubble untouched.

Maybe that is why she finds herself stealing away to the studio out back, seeking out Frankie to talk about the bubble she keeps untouched. How she wants Guy nowhere near it, with his tall form and wonderful smells. All masculinity and solidity. Yet it is nothing she can decide that she wants.

Why would I break up with the nicest man in the world?” she questions, ruminates. As if Frankie is a sage with sound advice, someone who didn’t just stumble through a poorly crafted lie about neighborhood night watch and cheesy enchiladas.

“There’s a lot to like about Guy,” Frankie agrees and a pang hits Grace.

Agreement is not what she came looking for. Validation and affirmation of her decision more closely desired, if not something else. It’s all counterintuitive to what she should expect of the woman in front of her. A person whom Grace couldn’t drag away from a food sample stall in Costco one time because she was debating the merits of owning a gas powered lawn mower as opposed to the more environmentally friendly herd of pygmy goats to do the same job.

Typically, Grace is not a sharer, keeping all of these things strapped closely to her. When she looks at Frankie though, it’s like the woman is begging to be let in. A safe choice to speak to, someone who is going through the same time period of life and knows about how it feels to get older and older day by day while growing, in some ways, more isolated and lonely.

Hell, they’ve both lost their husbands in the last year. Both of them are facing the unseen future together, partnerless. And it’s not that Grace doesn’t think she can survive it, no. It’s about never experiencing intimacy, of being held by someone each night who genuinely wants to be lying next to her. Who wants to wake up beside her. Yes, the sex would be an added perk but it’s the disconsolate life looming.

“Maybe it’s about falling asleep in someone’s arms,” Grace murmurs, a novel idea in theory.

“I could do that too, but you won’t like it,” Frankie offers.

Grace wants to ask, why wouldn’t she like it? It would be a body, would it not? Granted, not one she is in love with but it isn’t that way with Guy either. The idea of Frankie pressed against her, near her, keeping her warm on the nights the wind picks up off the ocean and billows the curtains in her room, cooling a long day of sweat filled minutes. It’s not the worst future she can think of.

Frankie has turned into a constant for Grace and she can’t imagine how. Yet even that fact is less frightening than having to spend her days eating hoagies, golfing, and watching Guy Ambien eat in the wee hours of the night.

“I know what I have to do. I just don’t know how I’m gonna do it,” Grace hears herself say in exasperation.

When Frankie offers the idea of talking to herself on a video screen, it’s somehow a less absurd idea than she expected. Even if she doesn’t want to admit it, a vlog is probably in her future.  
****  
On the ride to the hospital, Grace would just like silence. Complete and utter. But Frankie’s fingers nervously drum against the window and it’s a feat in and of itself not to pull the car over and make her sit on her hands for the rest of the drive. Plus, Frankie’s previous comment pisses Grace off.

“I do feel horrible,” Grace aggravatedly announces all of a sudden, her tone biting.

Frankie doesn’t turn from the window, but the drumming ceases. She’s listening. Grace takes it as her chance to keep going.

“I feel horrible that the man I was married to for forty years cheated on me for twenty of those. I feel angry at him for being the go to for my one emotionally available daughter,” she begins. Doesn’t mention Brianna because it’s too close of a carbon copy, emotionally, to herself. “I feel horrible that I dumped the one person who genuinely cared for me and all I can imagine now is being alone forever. No Robert because he could be dead for all I know, no Guy, certainly no Phil or anyone else.”

Grace takes a moment to breathe, feels tears springing to her eyes. Her heart aches in her chest and she feels empty, hollow, a shell.

“I’ll be there,” is murmured so quietly, she almost thinks she hallucinates it. Grace turns sharply to look at Frankie in the passenger seat, still staring out the window.

“Sol is my past, my beautiful and complicated, messy past. I might have boundary issues and all, but I know it’s over now. He’s got Robert,” Frankie explains, then turns to face Grace.

A tear runs down her face and Grace thinks it can’t be possible for her heart to hurt any more than it already is.

“And I’ve got you,” she whispers.

Grace feels as if she’s been socked squarely in the chest now. Isn’t this what she’s been searching for all along? Companionship in another person? All this time, she’s been looking at sex as a component to this bleak future that’s not finite, wanting to not let go of something many her age have given up on.

 _What’s happening right now?_ , she thinks to herself. This is the second time in as many days Frankie has offered something to Grace that she has been seeking. Again, for the second time, Grace is halting any other possibility in her mind, giving in to Frankie holding her, waking up next to her, being there when she needs someone most.

The aches turn into flutters and Grace gradually becomes more sure than anything if she doesn’t get out of the car, she’s going to lose her shit.

As if hearing her internal thoughts, Frankie picks up where she left off.

“I’ve got your back on this. No matter how bad it is or isn’t with Robert, know I’m there for you. You helped me see the light about Sol. I can be your support during this whole hospital bit.” She stops and then makes a funny face.

“Even if you did kill him?” Grace asks sarcastically, to cut the tension and the insane thoughts leaping through her mind about Frankie. To officially end her contemplations completely.

“That’s not fucking funny,” Frankie shoots back and turns to the window. The tapping resumes.

“Come on, Frankie. I’m just as scared as the next person about what to expect when we get to the hospital. I may not be in love with Robert, but he is the father of my children and I think I’m owed a chance to be the one to take him out, not a faulty heart. You didn’t do this to him. Sol didn’t do this to him. I’m as sure of that as anything.”

Grace hears a sniff on the other side of the car, starts to feel really guilty for using Frankie to dissipate her own fears.

“Let’s just get to the hospital and maybe all this will gain some clarity,” Frankie’s voice sounds again. She turns her body more fully toward the window, shoulder squared away from Grace.

The conversation is done. Grace leaves them in the quiet she was seeking for the duration of their trip. Even as they walk in the sliding doors of the ER, Frankie won’t meet her gaze, won’t even so much as look at her.

Grace wonders if she’s being overly dramatic or if the feeling she’s having right now isn’t akin to what landed Robert face down on his kitchen table. Everything is dreary, blurry, and burns with a potent cocktail of emotions she wishes she couldn’t feel. Any of it.  
****  
Grace is floating on a warm cloud of alcoholic bliss, her lips savoring the cold martini as it slides down her throat. Her body feels the perfect amount of fuzzy as she gazes out across the beach, toes tucked warmly into the sand.

Frankie’s joint lights up the twilight with burning ash that flakes off and catches the wind. Grace can feel her inhale deeply as their shoulders brush against one another, then lets it go in a haze. Her eyes narrow to slits and she offers the object to Grace, who shakes her head.

“You have your vices, I have mine,” she responds and takes another drink, draining the last of the contents. Weakly, she tosses the glass aside to land on the sand with a soft thunk.

“Yeah, like pilfering Vitamixes from your old vampire house and freeing poor, sad corn husk shakers from never ending desolation and unappreciation” She eyes Grace. “No one will love them like I do.” 

Grace lets out a laugh and stares out into the distance. A gull dives, resurfaces, disappears into the distance. 

Frankie takes another drag, exhales, and Grace boldly sucks in some of the retreating cloud. Maybe it’s the alcohol, maybe some of the pot is getting into her system. Whatever it is, she finds her head falling to Frankie’s shoulder and getting lost in the methodical ebb and flow of the waves.

“Our husbands are married,” Grace sighs.

“Blah, don’t remind me,” Frankie grunts, flicks a bit of the embers of the joint away. Her head tilts slightly and Grace can feel it resting against her own.

“I’m so proud of you. I know that wasn’t easy for you to do.”

“Someone wise once told me it could correct my karma. Or chi. Or whatever bullshit you were selling at that moment to get me to do what you wanted.” Frankie stops, pokes Grace in the side. “Little do you know, I’d probably have done it anyway. Not for them or for me. But for you. Because you were so dead set on it.”

“It was the right thing.”

“What is the right thing anymore? I thought being married to Sol and still hating you each time we got together would be the right thing until I died. Now here you are with your head on my shoulder after bossing me around.” Frankie stops, sucks in a breath like she’s been punched in the gut.

Grace shifts up worriedly and looks into Frankie’s eyes which have grown darker with the fading light. She’s not sure what Frankie sees in her own because Grace can’t even quite make out what she’s feeling herself. 

“Suddenly, spending the rest of my life with you doesn’t seem like the worst possible thing that could happen anymore,” Frankie confesses.

If she weren’t a little bit high and a lot of bit drunk, Grace might feel the Earth tilt, scrabble to rearrange back on its axis. Instead, her own head falls back to Frankie’s shoulder while her arm wraps around the other woman’s midsection.

She has no words for this, only actions. Grace has to let the silence speak, and the gentle rake of her fingers down Frankie’s rib cage. She has to let this be enough, for now, since she has no idea what else to give.


	4. The Second Wind So Close to the End

The beginning of their lives revolving around sex happens when Frankie makes her deal with Brianna.

The beach house has always been an eclectic mix of this and that, it’s fair share of tasteful art blended with a stray dick sculpture here and there. Not that Grace has ever paid much attention to them, merely letting them be because Frankie said it disrupted the patrician flow of the interior where Grace’s touch had been solely present.

Now, everywhere she turns are vaginas. Ones in black and white and fully colored, realistic and abstract, all of them vividly detailed down to the smallest intricacy. Grace is no artist but she’s pretty sure she could crudely sketch out a replica of Frankie’s actual genitals due to the amount of canvases she’s seen in the last few weeks.

Tucking another sketch under her arm, she drags it to the studio, kicking open the door with her right foot and barely managing to get the oversized piece through the door. Frankie looks up from another drawing, mild amusement flickering across her face and then disappearing.

“Why was that one so much larger?” Grace huffs, taking a moment to gain her equilibrium again after hauling the painting from the house to here.

“I wanted it to be more to scale,” she smirks.

“If yours is that large, you might want to seek medical help,” Grace retorts, safely steering clear of specific details she notices. Or pretends she doesn’t. “And haven’t I been exposed to your genitals enough lately?”

“There’s a wonderful little morsel of snark dangling precariously on the tip of my tongue which I will refrain from uttering,” Frankie smiles, holding up a finger.

Grace crosses the room to stand by Frankie and her newest creation. This one is a bit more true to life, so to speak, than the others she has seen. Less abstraction and less random color, not looking like one of those adult coloring books you fill in.

“Let me guess, you again?” Grace asks.

“If you’re jealous, we could always put you back on the box, but this is one sit that I don’t think you’d much be in to,” Frankie offers, throwing a casual gesture to Grace’s privates.

“Wha, what?” Grace chokes.

“I thought you were happy about getting your face off the box but if you’re clinging to your vain idealism, I could always do a quick mock up. That would require some…” Frankie glances down at Grace who can feel her own cheeks scald. “Research and study on my end.”

“I’m not posing for your vagina art, and I’m certainly not asking you to put mine out there for the world to see. I prefer to keep it...private.”

“Hmm, which is how they get the term for it I suppose,” Frankie hums, her arm working to add more curved lines to the picture in front of her.

She drops the brush and spins to face Grace, who surely must be ten shades of red by now.

“The lube. You’ve used it, right? Maybe you can can help me out on this. What does it inspire your vagina with? I can take your brainstorming and add some of that to my design.”

Grace can’t speak, can’t say anything. It’s as if her vocal chords have frozen and no longer remember how to work, Frankie looking intently at her.

“Oh, sorry. I guess that’s way personal but we’ve been through some shit together, so I thought you and I were cool with sharing. Or over sharing. But I get it. You’d rather not,” Frankie nods, tries to look understanding but fails.

Admitting that the jar is half empty in Grace’s bedside night table even though she only took it out of the fridge four days ago seems the kind of over sharing Frankie would be alright with. That it’s so damn good, she can’t help but consciously reach for it when…she’s having some alone time. That she’s seventy-one freaking years old and is going through the stuff like she’s a teenage boy.

“I may have used it once or twice,” Grace lies, turning away from Frankie and popping the collar of her shirt a little higher to avoid the crimson flush creeping up her chest and neck. She’s never been great at fudging the truth.

“With Guy?” Frankie’s eyes light up.

“So not going there with you,” Grace warns, holding up a finger.

“That’s a no. Look, masturbation is a natural process, Grace. Everyone does it,” Frankie chides her prudishness. Looks down at Grace again. “Even you, I’m sure.”

“My sex life, or lack thereof, is none of your business. And besides, why are you spending so much time making it if you and your yam farmer aren’t doing test runs?” Grace tosses back.

“I’m an open and free spirit, so I’ll go full disclosure with you here. I haven’t used it with Jacob because we aren’t on that level emotionally. As far as using it in general, yes. I have frequently relied on it during my moments of self pleasure and find it wonderfully helpful to woman of our age.”

Frankie rises from her stool and joins Grace who parked herself on the couch after her less than convincing lie. Grace doesn’t need to know this, doesn’t want to know this, but Frankie is offering so willingly and now, dear God, she’s right beside her. Grace watches out of the corner of her eye as Frankie leans back against the beat up couch.

“I want my lube in every store and in every person. All over the planet. For the young, for the middle aged, for the old,” she says waving her hands around and then shoves her shoulder into Grace’s on the ‘old’ part.

“Seems ambitious,” Grace looks dubiously at her and finally relaxes. She leans back and against Frankie.

“I’m very serious about pleasure and vaginal care, Grace. Yours included” Frankie points, again.

Grace folds her hands over her lap and feels a creeping blush set in. Frankie has always been an open book, so to speak. How did they get here though? It seems not so long ago, they were giving each other fake air kisses and exchanging benign pleasantries because it was the right thing to do. Now they share the beach house and talk about things such as this, she guesses, however uncomfortable.

“My vagina is fine, thank you,” Grace fidgets.

“You know, it’s bad when I’m more concerned about it than your boyfriend was.”

“We are talking as if it’s a living, breathing thing here. I’m fine, Frankie. No, Guy didn’t exactly create a symphony down there, but I managed. I manage.”

The room shifts to silence, settles. A beat, then sound again.

“I only want the best for you,” Frankie whispers. “For people our age.” An addendum. Something added to take away, ironically, from the levity of the conversation.

Grace scans the room, full of Frankie’s artwork and begins to do that thing she’s done since she moved in with Frankie. Feel.

“At least someone does,” Grace sighs and lays her hand across Frankie’s.

Silence envelopes again and they sit, the weight of unsaid things floating through the air.  
****  
The past beckons like a ghost, willowy and wispy, and Grace cannot stifle the moans of curiosity it produces. When you get to the third act in life, the amount of people lined up in the annals of lost time are large. She had tucked Phil there, a dusty page in a novel never shown to the world. A dangerous page. One she’s shocked she told Frankie how to find in the first place.

The lights of the beach house seem to dim and flicker, or maybe it’s just her vision from staring at the computer screen for an exorbitant amount of time. Staring at a picture of a dumb rottweiler and contemplating a life she never had, one she was sure she wasn’t allowed to.

Hadn’t it all been so clear back then? So heartbreakingly obvious what she had to do, even when one beautiful afternoon with the sun shining and the breeze floating through the open windows of their home, she had stood a little too close because he was like flame to her moth-like form.

Even though she knew better, knew it would never take flight completely because she had Robert, inattentive and leaving her starving Robert. Despite this, she has been the one to instigate, to open the door and invite Phil in to touch, to claim, to physically connect with her for one meager moment in her life.

So she let him kiss her amidst the sawdust and destruction of the kitchen, maybe a little bit hell bent on destroying the perfect on paper life she had created but that was leaving her wind beaten and downtrodden.

You can only take so much, live so long without, she’d told herself as she’d wrapped an arm around his strong shoulders. If Robert couldn’t give, she would take. From whomever, whatever, however.

“So I take it you’ve gotten over your initial dissatisfaction of me snooping and finding Phil Love of your Life Milstein.”

Grace doesn’t even turn from the computer screen, instead feeling a hollow ache in her chest from the recent events. Why had she ever let Frankie talk her into going to Mission Viejo? The ache feels like a scab that’s been removed, left puckered and by all intents and purposes, something that should be fine but isn’t. It’s this type of thing that creates scars and Grace has worked so hard in her life to not show people these, physical or otherwise.

She can’t even find it in herself to go against Frankie’s comment, instead just sitting at the table without words to come from her mouth. Mopey teenagers do this, not older woman. She should soldier through this, but it’s much larger than loss. It’s the embers of embarrassment and uncertainty and hope, all burning and dying at the same time. Her cheek connects with the cool countertop and she casts her eyes toward the computer screen again.

An arm curls around her shoulders and closes the laptop, slowly and carefully. All of a sudden, weight on the top of her head. Frankie is above her, cheek resting on the curls of Grace’s blonde locks. She says nothing now, just holding Grace like she has longed for so often throughout the course of her life. Damn it. Damn it all. She feels tears forming, ridiculous physical proof that she has a heart buried somewhere down deep.

“What are you doing?” Grace asks, anger creeping into her voice as she sits up quickly and watches Frankie back away.

“Trying to say I’m sorry,” Frankie looks unnerved. “I guess it’s not working.”

“Damn right, it’s not working. I’m mad, Frankie. You had no right,” her voice wavers.

“You’re the one who agreed to it!”

“I never would have if you hadn’t kept pushing! This is your fault. All you ever do is run around and talk about your feelings and emotions, trying to get me to act the same way you do. I don’t know if you noticed this, but that isn’t the way my life has run for the last seventy plus years. I come from a long line of people incapable of sharing what they’re feeling.”

It’s all gushing out now and she can’t stop it. It’s as if the dam has been opened and everything has been building pressure behind it. This is precisely what she is telling Frankie she doesn’t want, what she isn’t good at. Too much is spilling forth and she just wants all of it to stop. She closes her eyes and weaves her fingers through her hair. Wants to shut everything out and just disappear.

“You don’t think I’ve been paying attention for the last forty years, Grace? To how you avoid and dismiss and move away from any type of situation where you might, for one second, show some vulnerability and, oh, I don’t know, be human?” Frankie says, grabbing her shoulders and latching on, not letting Grace seek the escape she so desperately craves.

Everything is turning into a conundrum. Grace feels completely sideswiped over the road trip and is infuriated at the woman for suggesting it in the first damn place. But at the same time, all she can think about is collapsing into Frankie in a sobbing heap, chasing the feel of another person willing and wanting to be near her, to hold her, to keep her from breaking apart.

“You’ll get through this. Just like you do everything. You’re Grace-fucking-Hanson. Nothing keeps you down, lady.”

Words that should encourage and embolden. Words meant to dry tears and straighten backs, to make heads be held high. Sorrow is a fickle thing though and powerful to boot.

“Leave me alone, Frankie” Grace says pulling away with a whisper. Emptiness again. Something she’s accustomed to.

She doesn’t turn around, can’t bear to as she ascends the stairs to bury herself and forget the world.  
****  
Here’s the thing about alcohol and blood. They mix wonderfully, blissfully well. Until they don’t. And while Grace isn’t literally bleeding, she feels like her heart has been punctured and is losing viscosity. And while she’s had years to learn her limit, to know how much she can handle, today seems like a fine time to say fuck it.

That’s why she meanders from the bar to home and causes chaos everywhere she goes, everything she touches turning to shit. Because it’s easy. Because it’s expected. Because she’s a vodka soaked train wreck in high heels and popped collars after all, right?

Frankie thinks Grace is built of concrete and stone, her children spot impenetrable walls they say, but it’s all nonsense. It’s all illusion.

The world thinks Grace Hanson doesn’t feel, but the reality of it is she feels too fucking much. Her life has been an emotional desert at times and that’s why it’s so easy to see the mirage for what it isn’t instead of what it actually is.

To shove cake in and sit on people’s laps who can barely stand the sight of her, who tolerate her only because the woman she’s just finished pushing into her chair and berating tolerates her.

This trip she’s on, this booze drenched nightmare, might be the death of her, but she finds it hard to care. Why should she when no one else will? Her children barely call her, Robert abandoned her, Phil doesn’t have the balls on him to give up his dutiful life for her, and Frankie is burning holes into every part of her like she wants to choke the life from Grace.

Which Grace can’t help but admit Frankie has every right to do, that thought sticking clearly even though she’s three sheets to the wind and being hoisted up and away from the table and the cake and Frankie, Coyote, and Bud.

Her head falls back and her stomach flips, flops, as she watches the ceiling change from beams and fans to stars and clouds. A little roughly, she lands on her back as she’s tossed onto a deck chair. Her eyes have a hard time focusing as something blurry comes into her vision.

“Frankie may put up with your shit, but I don’t have to,” she hears Jacob say, his deep and sonorous voice managing to pare Grace to the bone.

She wants him to leave, to shut the fuck up and let her either pass out or die, whichever comes first. Grace has known her tolerance level for years and while this is certainly a tinge past that, she has enough wherewithal to know she’s screwed up badly. It just seems easier to watch everything burn to the ground though than try to save it at this point.

His voice contains just the right combination of disgust and pity to embolden Grace to clap back, because getting in the last word seems important right now. Even if she does wish he’d take his self-righteous face and drown it in the ocean.

“Yeah, well, it must be SO nice to be perfect with your yams and fertilizer and farming and whatever else the fuck it is that you do,” Grace slurs, waving her hand around, meaning to point at him but ending up more heavenward.

“Grace…” Jacob warns, but she can’t stop herself. She has to continue.

“You get to have Frankie and I get to be alone,” she wails. “You get to fall asleep beside her at night, and hold her, and wake up to her in the morning.”

For the love of God, she needs to shut up. Or die, or pass out, both of which seem to be taking a really long time to happen despite their inevitability. She’s knee deep in shit she has no idea how to deal with, much less progress on from now that the words have been spoken.

“What are you getting at, Grace?”

What is she getting at? Does she even really know? Doesn’t this harken back to a very similar conversation she had with Frankie after she created another dumpster fire of a relationship with Guy? After the dung heap of a mess she’s willingly thrown herself into with Phil, despite Frankie’s warnings?

A vision flashes, to Phil being on top of her, inside her. Feeling full and not dead for once. Not like a zombie walking through life. Sex is sex when it boils down to it. It’s never been the important part to Grace, the connection to another warm body the real reward. It’s this she feels so squarely in her chest.

The thought makes her almost grateful she’s filled to the brim with vodka, even if the liquid is turning her into a wraith, seeking lifeblood or the bittersweet resolution of the end.

“You’re so fucking lucky and you don’t even know it,” she hears herself say.

“I do know it. And this conversation never happened,” he tells her and then disappears.

Mercifully, blackness finally pulls her under.  
****  
At some point during the night, she opens her eyes. Part of her consciousness registers this while the other half flounders for purchase on what has happened, where she has been, and where she needs to be. Everything feels like a fever dream.

Weight shifting the cushion under her, her stomach rolling and fighting to keep whatever she’s filled it with inside. It’s as if she’s in a barrel tumbling down Niagra Falls. Nothing makes sense and everything lurches forward.

“Oh, goody. You’re not dead,” a voice comes.

Stomachs really are persnickety things and Grace feels hers revolt against her aching body. Rolling over, she comes to face a colorful leg that is much too bright, even in the darkness of the patio.

“I know you’re not going to remember shit in the morning, but I had to check on you. Even if you do infuriate me beyond what the Gods know I can tolerate. I’ve told myself the real kicker is going to be when you actually do wake up again instead of being shipped off of this deck chair in a body bag reeking of booze and disparity, to find the quite witty and colorful art I’ve left to remind you of your piss poor choices,” Frankie smirks, but with little humor.

A moan escapes Grace and she isn’t sure how she made it exactly. She’s only half processing what is being said.

“I may have left a bottle of water for you beside the chair. Or it could be more vodka to aide you in this balls to the wall alcohol trip you’re on. I’ll let you take the chance,” Frankie meanders on. “Oh, who am I kidding. It’s water. Mostly because I couldn’t live with myself if you actually died. And plus, I’m not so keen on brushing up on my knife skills in prison because I was an accomplice to your demise.”

Grace would speak if her mouth and brain weren’t filled with lumpy cotton. She manages to catch the disparaging look Frankie is giving her and becomes thankful she can’t say anything. It really is better this way, fighting with her eyelids to stay open instead of bantering drunkenly with her roommate.

“For what it’s worth, I’m still beyond angry with you because you’re a fucking asshole when you drink. And if I were a betting woman, which I’m not, you’re probably going to fuck up some more shit before you come back to the living. It’s kind of your thing. It’s what you do.”

Voice stops, only the sound of the ocean and night filling her ears.

“Happy booze filled dreams, Grace. Because tomorrow is going to hurt like hell.”

Weight shifts again and then is gone. Grace floats, like driftwood, back into the darkness.


	5. The Second Ending

Maybe it’s her overwhelming sense of guilt (something that never seems to be in short supply these days) or the blindsiding accusation from Brianna that propels her upstairs and into her closet. 

She stands, staring at the rows of crisp and laundered clothing, feeling thrown through a wringer emotionally. Grace wants to cry, to weep so loudly and collapse on the carpet beneath her feet. Instead, she reaches and rips a sweater off a hanger nearby. Next a pair of slacks and then propels herself to her jewelry box, selecting a matching gold pair of earrings and a necklace. 

She goes through the motions with lead in her heart, but also something hopeful beating below the sinew and muscle. As she carefully styles the blonde curls of her hair, all she can let herself think about it Frankie and what she’s decided to do, what she’s agreed to give Babe. Can Grace ever say she’s been that type of friend? The one who you can undeniably count on when the going is tough? 

The vehemence of her earlier protestations isn’t lost on her so she knows the least likely thing Frankie expects is to see her anywhere near Babe’s final hurrah. Grace mills through the crowd as Babe smiles and speaks of the people who have touched her life. She’s looking at the computer in front of Babe when she feels the room shift focus to her. 

“As I live and breathe. Grace Hanson.”

Frankie spins, shocked, searching for Grace’s visage amongst the crowd. When her eyes catch Grace, they shine. It’s all Grace can do to hold that look, to not run to her and apologize for yet another asinine quarrel. This is a celebration of vibrancy and flowing blood, and as the sounds dull into a monotonous clap, the room couldn’t shine any brighter because there is Frankie, looking at Grace with something even she can’t quite pinpoint. 

Grace’s heart lurches, aches, beats with an unfathomable feeling of confusion that eclipses pretty much anything she’s ever felt for anyone. She’d almost swear she’s had slivers of this in her life but never whole bits, chasing something that every other person seems to receive and give so freely. Something that she tried to have with Robert, desperately longed for with Phil. Something that no one, not until this unlikely prospect in front of her has seemed to give her: reason. Purpose. 

With this, she lets herself be enveloped into the waiting arms of Babe and the thoughtful look of Frankie. It’s like homecoming, a warm blanket of love Grace isn’t sure she’s ever allowed herself to take. It’s that thing her and her daughter just discussed, right in front of her the entire time. 

****

When Frankie walks out, she’s surprisingly calm for someone who has just watched the life leave another person. Silent tears flow from her eyes though, two steady streams that Grace is sure would make a river if given the time and left in this space. 

Her own limbs feel like they’re glued to the stool that she sits on, doused in heartache not only from Babe’s earthly departure but for the enormity of what Frankie must be feeling. To have had something such as this to carry on her shoulders, a buckling and even crippling thing to do. 

She manages to propel herself across the room and into Frankie’s body, wrapping her arms tightly around her like a blanket. Her own tears start to fall then, mixing with Frankie’s as she presses their cheeks together. 

For once in her life, she doesn’t think about what she’s doing, her actions a knee jerk reaction. For this reason perhaps, she doesn’t even notice when she’s moved their faces apart and she’s placing soft kisses on Frankie’s cheek, tasting salt and melancholy there. Her hands are in the brown and gray tresses of Frankie’s hair and she softly strokes through it, trying to soothe and shed her own despair. 

“I’m so sorry, Frankie,” she whispers between kisses and it’s quite possibly the most intimate gesture she’s ever given someone so freely. The darkness envelopes them and everything is quiet. Not even the tick of a clock can be heard within Babe’s home, as if everything else has stopped along with Babe’s heart. 

She feels Frankie’s fingers on her shoulder and is pulled away to gaze into sad eyes. Something else flickers in them too, when the moonlight hits them just right. Grace feels her heart constrict in her chest, just when she was so sure it had given up on her tonight from the unending sorrow. 

_ I want to kiss her _ , Grace thinks. To admit that she really is capable of unconditional love. In fact, she feels so strongly about it that she can barely stop herself. It’s not the right time or place but it’s the first time she has thought this clearly. It’s frightening possibility is tamped down by the sheer enormity of how good it would feel. Yes,  _ feel.  _

They’re still so close and her breath hitches a bit as Frankie leans in, her lips lightly pressing to Grace’s forehead. “Let’s go home,” she sighs, sounding drained. 

Grace’s eyes stay closed for a few more seconds, lost ethereally between possibility and reality. Frankie’s standing in the doorway now, two paramedics near her as she points toward the bedroom, past Grace. 

Outside, they trek the distance to their beach house with their hands intertwined, the hum of night drifting into their ears. It’s a slow journey, one that takes longer than it should because when the body is disconsolate, it feels as if weight is dragged with the effort it takes to move a ball and chain tethered to an ankle. 

They reach the beach house less than who they before, irrevocably changed and uncertain how. Grace can feel Frankie’s fingers shift within her own, pulling away when all Grace wishes she would do is hold on. Frankie doesn’t even look at her as she goes toward her studio. Just as Frankie is about to reach the door, Grace hears her own voice stab through the silence and air.

“Stay with me tonight” only above a whisper, so uncertain in its utterance that both have a hard time processing the meaning. 

Frankie’s hand hovers on the handle, frozen in limbo thinking God knows what. Sparks of misgiving flair within Grace and she isn’t sure she should have made the offer. Normally she’s so good at control, mastering it in most aspects of her life. Few things throw her for a loop. Within Grace, Frankie knows no moderation. Within Grace, she’s always been beyond control.

Grace is mere seconds from forgetting the whole thing, retreating to solitude to mourn for things she can comprehend and not. Staring at the ground, she begins to pivot and head toward the stairs. When her foot hits the first one, she feels a presence behind her. A soft touch collides with the small of her back. Pushing her forward, surging on with her. She doesn’t turn around, but the palm guides her upward. 

****

It’s been weeks since Babe left them both gifts, a silent reminder of her overwhelming and unending friendship to the both of them. While Grace would admit it to no one, not even Frankie, her present has been getting some heavy rotation. Every nerve ending in her wrist is telling her to ease up and do something else more worthwhile other than herself. It’s not like she’s craving it, really. More like a way to chase boredom with a halfway decent orgasm.

She’d do something else with her time but it’s not like her dance card is filled up, especially after the sting of her escapade with Phil which still bites bitterly in the back of her throat, making it feel as if she’s swallowing cotton when she thinks about it. She’d thrown herself into the possibility of romanticism and being wanted with him, so polar opposite of anything she’s really ever allowed herself to feel. It’s all a jumbled mess, just like the tidal wave of self loathing and something bordering on dangerous she’d experienced when she’d spotted Frankie near Babe’s side as she had walked into that party that was full of bright colors, pulsing life, and looming death.

The ache in her chest in similar in the two events, not necessarily distinctly different in kinesthetics. With Phil, it was hollow and lonely in its truth. Whatever has been morphing, and she knows she’s feeling it, is too much to sit and dwell on where Frankie is concerned. She cannot. She will not. There’s too much at stake. Incredibly too much precious to lose.

Hesitancy fills her and she goes back and forth between letting her body be carried toward the doorway to seek Frankie out and staying inside of their home, pacing the floor forlornly.

Now, all she can focus on are the silent reminders of Frankie’s presence around the house, or lack thereof. A paintbrush lying on the top of the coffee table. A smear of acrylic on the edge of the sink. Crumbs leading out the door to the studio, a Hansel and Gretel trail almost begging Grace to follow it and find some life at the end. 

Frankie’s show is fast approaching and Grace thinks this is quite possibly the most lonely the house has ever felt. Even in her eccentricity, Frankie injects life into any room, any space. Before she knows what she is doing, she has drifted to the studio and opened the door. 

Poking her head in ever so slightly, she sees Frankie in the middle of the room twirling a paint brush between her fingers, the palette in front of her a smear of various colors but the canvas mysteriously blank. Hadn’t she raved to Grace about all of her creative energy flowing? 

Grace decides to knock, ever so gently to announce her arrival and Frankie turns her body slightly to glance at Grace. She offers a smile and motions for Grace to enter. Crossing the room, Grace sees canvases amassed and stacked in different areas of the studio. She can’t make out much of what any of them are before she comes to stand next to Frankie who sits on a stool, staring at the white blankness in front of her.

“So much for artistic fury or...whatever?” She asks as she brushes her shoulder against Frankie’s. Let’s herself indulge in a touch, a sensation that isn’t coming from her own body and being given to herself. It seems like the only gesture she can safely get away with without having to explain why it’s happening or drifting into begging for more. 

“It’s all up here” Frankie answers, swirling her fingers around her head but then holds up the digits in front of Grace’s face, and wiggles them. Grace fights not to let her mind wander down a gutter. “Just not here.”

She then gives Grace and funny look, one that Grace isn’t sure she’s really seen before in order to predict what’s about to happen. She hops off the stool and rounds it to come behind Grace, letting those once twirling fingers trace a path slowly down Grace’s arm. 

Grace’s breath hitches. What the fuck is happening? She feels Frankie’s hips and pelvis connect with her posterior, shoving her closer toward the easel, slightly knocking the stool out of the way. 

Frankie is a bit shorter than Grace is so when she deposits her paintbrush in Grace’s fingers, she leans her face softly against her right arm. Her hand wraps around Grace’s, maneuvering her hands to grip the wooden handle correctly. 

“What are you doing, Frankie?” Grace manages, only escaping her in a whisper. She hasn’t seen Frankie in what’s felt like days and now all she can feel is her behind her, against her, wrapped around her, and here it all is again. Too much. Way too much. 

“Maybe the idea can flow through me and you can take it in by osmosis or whatever sciency shit people believe in,” she smiles, bringing their hands down to dip into the red paint. 

“I’m not an artist,” Grace argues, feeling her heart race. “I can’t do this. I’m not like you.”

“Haven’t you ever done one of those bullshit paint by step art classes for therapeutic reasons? It’s all the rage these days,” Frankie scoffs. 

“Why would I pay someone fifty dollars for that when I have you,” Grace answers lowly, turning to gaze into Frankie’s shocked blue eyes.

The room seems warm, a blazing fire of possibility, and Grace can feel it creeping into her alabaster skin, betraying every carefully controlled emotion. Is this what you get when you suffer for forty years? Going from depravity to practically salivating for anything you can get?

“Right, of course” Frankie nods, breaking eye contact and smearing a streak of red across the canvas. She let’s go of Grace’s hand, leaving her feeling somewhat bereft after spiraling wonderfully out of control for a few moments. 

Grace cuts the tension with a laugh, staring at the canvas and its giant red hash mark. She lays down the brush on top of the palette and crosses her arms as Frankie comes to stand beside her, this time letting her shoulder brush Grace’s. 

“I think it’s safe to say I’m no Picasso, despite using brushes that may or may not be his.”

“It’s okay,” Frankie soothes. “Sometimes things don’t always start out as much, but they always have the potential to morph into something beautiful.”

When Frankie looks in her direction, Grace tries to tell her heart to not make anything more from the statement than what it is. 

****

The gallery is now empty, save for the two of them standing and staring at the little red dot on the painting of red and blue and yellow happiness instead of an angry ex-husband mustard stain. 

Grace can’t help but feel proud in the moment, like the dot is her accomplishment as well as Frankie’s. Something else tugs in her though as they walk out and she tells Frankie how proud she is. 

It’s probably better to leave it alone, to not ask questions of it, but there she was on the canvas for everyone to see. Her painting, complete with fangs and martini glass and now, a singeing sting. Poor Grace, they’d said. 

“You made me a vampire,” she announces, trying to sound casual, but failing. Frankie’s arm is warm in the crook of hers and she’s transported back a few days to being in the studio, touching like this and feeling overwhelmed. That threatens now too as they meander toward the car. 

“Yes,” Frankie says slowly, as if tip-toeing around the idea, the concept.

Grace starts to elaborate but can’t think of a single thing to rebute about the picture. Because it’s maddeningly, depressingly true. What’s she been doing these last few months, hell, even the last few years where Frankie is concerned?

Sucking and savoring every droplet of human connection she can, all while holding a bottle or glass perched between her fingers. 

At first, Frankie was a surrogate being to berate because Robert was out of the picture. Then she was a stand-in friend when all of the mean girls and puss face ditched her because a divorce was too messy for them to care about emotionally, instead just using it for gossip. Since then, Frankie has become a replacement…something else entirely. A person Grace has evolved to cling to when all her relationships with men crash and burn, when she gets tired of touching herself and needs someone else to stimulate her physically and non- sexually.

Grace is on the verge of crying from all of the thoughts, a sure fire way to kill the mood if ever there was one, until Frankie stops her with a hand on her shoulder and then on her cheek.  All she can do is hide her eyes and fold, give in to the hand trailing along her skin.

“Oh, Grace. Don’t you see? That’s just a part of you, not all of you,” Frankie sighs. 

Grace barks a humorless laugh and sniffs a little, opening her eyes to shoot Frankie a look. 

“Yeah, you get drunk and shout shitty things about me and have said some hurtful things toward me and my children,” she begins and Grace’s heart aches in her chest. “But you’ve also pulled me through some hellacious shit too, helping me to grieve when I lost Sol and Babe and giving me something to look forward to with this little self pleasure business of ours. You’re magic and Napalm, Grace. It’s a fine line between which side someone will see.”

If she were anyone else, if this were one of those stupid romantic movies Frankie sometimes forces them to watch together while she cackles at the ridiculousness of the tropes, Grace would wrap her arm around Frankie’s waist and bury herself within the woman like an acquiescing promise. 

But it’s not. It’s them. It’s whatever they’ve become and Grace can only call her friend to anyone who asks. 

Frankie’s phone buzzes and she disengages from Grace, floundering as she tries to pull it out of whatever place it’s vibrating from. When Grace sees the screen, sees Frankie’s uncertain look toward her, she doesn’t much feel like Napalm at all.

As Frankie turns and whispers something to Jacob, low enough to where Grace can’t hear, she feels swallowed and submerged. 


	6. Third Time's A Charm

She doesn’t want to do this here, not now. Not in front of a bunch of nerdy young to middle aged men who couldn’t possibly get what’s it's like to be a woman of a certain age, frustrated at being told no over and over again. One that’s all but floundering now to make an idea become a reality instead of a plane dive bombing to the ground in flames. 

“And now it’s all poke and pull and let her rip. And our vibrator has been kicked to the curb,” Grace gripes, feeling an odd emotion stir in her at using the personal pronoun when she could have easily just have used something less specific and intimate. While she’s on admissions, she may as well finish it off. “Well you may not need a vibrator anymore, but I still do.” 

“Oh, I do!” Frankie tries to appease, but it falls flat on Grace’s ears.

“No you don’t. You’re too busy burning through those fancy condoms with your boyfriend. Who hates me by the way,” Grace adds, as an afterthought.

And here they go. Now it isn’t about the condoms or the vibrator or anything else other than Jacob and his extreme hatred of Grace. And honestly, she gets it. She really does. When you drunkenly sit in other people's laps, eat cake like a cave woman with your hands, and scream obscenities and mean words, it’s bound to happen. 

When she hears the rain on the roof, it seems like the perfect way to cap off another crappy meeting. 

She wonders if when she walks out the door, she’ll melt into a puddle on the pavement, a pair of nude heels and navy power suit all that’s left behind of her. Wonders if maybe Frankie just wouldn’t be so much better at all this without her anyway.

Frankie is on her heels, surely sniffing the vapor trail of rage Grace is leaving behind as she lets her legs push her to get out of the damn building, away from another rejection. Another loss.

When it boils down to it, it’s probably not even the friggin’ condoms she’s mad about. It’s something else she knows has been itching below the surface a while, but that she keeps ignoring because it’s easier to leave it be instead of clawing to get relief.

They reach the car tucked under the same umbrella. She does the only caring thing she can, stepping through puddles in her Louboutin's and holding on to Frankie's arm so that she won’t go ankle deep into the water with her clogs. Springs or no springs.

She rounds to her driver’s side door, deposits the umbrella in the back seat, and gives her wilting blonde curls a vigorous shake. The rain sluices down the window in a droplet river and is the only sound in the car, save for Frankie’s shallow breathing. For half a second, the silence unnerves her, brings an apology bubbling up to her lips. When Frankie speaks though, it dies.

“So are we going to discuss your little outburst just now or chalk it up to you just being your normal, self deflecting....?” she pauses. “Self.”

Grace leans back in her seat, making no move to put the keys into the ignition. Apparently Frankie picks up on this and turns to meet her head on.

“I’m not saying I’m good at any of this or know what I’m doing, Grace. Far from it in fact. And I take a lot of lead from you. But that back there?” She points behind them to the incubator. “That wasn’t just about our business, was it?”

_No, it’s precisely about our business_ , Grace thinks. _Yours and mine. Not yours and Jacob’s_. Somewhere along this ridiculous journey, she’s become the third wheel. The other point on a triangle. _A damn love triangle_ , she idly thinks.

“Frankie, look,” she sighs. “I got upset because you and I had discussed our ideas for the company. What we wanted to achieve. When you brought up the other idea, it felt like focus had shifted away from that.”

_Away from me_ , she wants to add. Of course, though, doesn’t knowing full well it would come off like the stilted lover she has turned her role in Frankie’s life into. 

“I need this,” Grace whispers as the rain continues to patter on the roof of the car, a mimic of her own heart beneath her chest. There's enough ambiguity in the statement to serve many purposes and leave her feeling somewhat grounded. Nothing like she'd feel if she uttered her other thought: I need you. That goes unsaid, like so many other things have lately. 

“Don't worry, Grace. This will all pan out. We will find the money and get this thing off the ground. Just you wait and see.”

For Grace though, it's hard to feel like anything but floundering lately. Like grasping to a rope on the shore while she floats further out into oblivion.

******

It seems that like much else in Grace’s life, just as everything is starting to go well, catastrophe strikes. They’ve just gotten past the embarrassing failure and redemption of the focus group when they come home one night to find their well constructed life breached by an outside source, the glass scattered on the floor as fragments of remembrance. 

Grace watches as Frankie flutters around the living room in nothing short of a frenzy. She knows how to stop this, has been given instructions on how to cease these flights from reason during earthquakes and Del Taco shortages and hiatuses of Ray Donovan. Mallory and Brianna are here though, and some dumb cop who acts like he couldn’t investigate his way out of a bucket. It would be odd to just walk over and open Frankie’s shirt slightly, applying heat and pressure to her sternum without everyone knowing it’s a thing that works.

Then the word hits and everything freezes.  _ Gun _ . 

It’s as if all of the air has left the room and she’s outside herself now. Another secret dangling so close to a person who is already in prime need of a Valium or a well placed tranquilizer to her posterior. 

“Grace, do you own a gun?” Frankie asks in a voice that slices Grace to the core. 

_ Yes _ , she wants to say.  _ I own a gun. I know how to shoot it too and I’m pretty sure I could plant a bullet between the eyes of anyone who tried to fuck with you or I.  _

Which of course she doesn’t say. Playing the knight in shining armor to Frankie’s damsel in distress right now doesn’t seem like the touch this situation calls for. So instead, she does the only thing she knows to do: make a faulty promise and tell Frankie a droning list of platitudes. 

She lies, says she doesn’t have a gun and never would touch one, just to see Frankie calm the fuck down and get the two dollar cop out of their home so they can both rest. So yes, she makes that inebriated uttering and presses her lips to her best friend’s forehead in an act that is really blurring the lines between what friends do for one another and not. 

Sometimes, especially lately, it seems so much easier to survive inside a well constructed lie than to be flayed open and gaping from a raw truth. 

And honestly, that should be the end of the whole fiasco. Grace should have the time to regroup, gather herself from the flood of emotions she experiences when asked to kiss Frankie innocently. Yet, it is anything but innocent in Grace’s mind, a step closer to fruition that never seems to be close, a sliver of sweet nectar when you are bereft of anything such as that. 

“You and your wife are adorable,” two dollar cop says. 

_ My wife _ . The word sticks to and in Grace like a pin. 

“Thank you,” Frankie smiles, a look on her face of contentment. She doesn’t try to correct or explain. 

_ My wife _ , Grace thinks again. It should seem weird and even to the past version of her, repulsive. When did all of that change? When did something such as this cease to bother? True, things between the two of them have been changing. Every day a new adventure and exercise in learning a boundary Grace thought she had does not really exist anymore. 

Things like growing even older together begin to flash through her brain, of sunsets with hand holding in deck chairs, of movie nights buried under Peruvian wool blankets and into each other, of resting her head against the solace of Frankie’s body in many places, some that have always been covered but that Grace longs to touch and learn. 

In the space of her room afterward, even when the lights dim out to darkness, Grace’s thoughts do not. They continue to shine brightly, a revolt of sense in her brain. 

*****

She’s standing at the kitchen island of their home when she hears the door open. Greetings are something foreign and far between so it’s not like she expects Robert to seek her out and discuss the ins and outs of his latest business trip with Sol. 

She’d idly thought about calling Frankie in the guy’s absence for a cup of coffee or to do anything other than be alone. With Mallory out of the house now and Brianna off at college, solitude is more pronounced than before and even though she tries to push through it, it does eat at Grace. 

Where Frankie is concerned, she has spent her whole life avoiding the woman though so that seems like a good prerequisite for not picking up phone and asking for her company, even though her husband is gone again, just like Grace’s. She'd probably mutter a "What the fuck," and look at the caller ID thinking it a fluke, then hang up because the NSA or CIA was seemingly/probably trying to contact her through her arch nemesis. And honestly, Grace wouldn't blame her a bit, their relationship icily formal to have known each other for twenty years. 

Nothing like the camaraderie their husbands seem to share. Frequency of these little escapes are increasing because of this and while Grace would like to feel jealous, it's easier than walking on eggshells or being flat out ignored. At least when she's alone, she gets to let her hair down and the guise she has to use when Robert is at home.

When the box slides across the counter, it startles Grace out of her thoughts. She’d expected Robert to retreat to his room and close his door like always, but here he is standing in front of her with a small, thin smile across his lips. 

“Good trip?” Grace ignores the object in front of her and moves the fruit salad to the refrigerator. It’s an idle pleasantry, one she spits out because it’s customary and something she’s been taught to do in her marriage. Show interest, go through the motions even though the man in front of her lost that formality toward her years ago. 

“Aren’t you even curious what’s in the box?” Robert questions. 

Grace moves back to the counter and looks down, places a hand on either side of the case in front of her. It’s too plain to be jewelry, square and bulky. Nothing like Robert’s other “just because” gifts she usually receives after a sabbatical from him. 

Flipping open the lid, her vision falls on a silver gleam of metal, soft cushioning behind. No, not at all like her just because gifts. Those were ornamental and meant to adorn Grace to the point she appeared as mere perfection. This is something else entirely different. 

She traces her hand along the handle, up to the barrel, touch as delicate as can be. A gun. Robert’s bought her a gun.

“I know I’m gone a lot and the house is so big and you are alone now that the girls are away. I thought this might give you some peace of mind. Help you to not feel as alone,” he offers softly. 

What she would like to say doesn’t flow forth. About how a gun isn’t going to make up for the lack of a warm body beside her at night. How a gun isn’t going to investigate the sounds creaking through the house at night or that it won’t love her and give her purpose. Not that Robert has done any of those things for a very long time, but it is a basic instinct to want this, is it not?

“Okay…” she begins, still at a loss for words. 

“There’s a range not far from here. I could take you between one of my business trips, show you how to use it. You’ll need to take the safety class of course,” he yammers on and at some point, Grace tunes him out. 

Of course she will do this, because it’s the role she plays. Dutiful wife. If Robert says it’s a good idea, she’ll do it merely since that’s what expected of her. It’s what she’s done since the beginning where he is concerned. All out of respect because she’d agreed to this life, had watched with panic and amusement as he had slipped the diamond on her hand over twenty years ago.

Wherever Robert leads her, she will follow. Even now that it be begrudgingly.

****

Grace now knows Robert’s face held a pained look of happiness upon his proposal to her. He was pretending and falling into a representation of what a man should want and need in his life for fulfillment. Now, the errant thought dances in her brain too: _maybe I was pretending just like him_. 

She wouldn’t dare utter that they’re alike, that they slithered from the same mold.  _ Gay  _ doesn’t exist in the repertoire of words Grace would use to classify herself. But then Frankie’s droning on about being a target and not feeling safe comes back to her, about asking Grace to make her promises by kissing her forehead when not so long ago, Grace had let the idea of kissing her far more intimately flutter while they both mourned Babe’s passing. 

Which is why, when Frankie walks out of Grace’s bathroom, it’s all she can do to contain her apprehension with what she knows is about to happen: another body in her bed. 

It’s been a while since another occupied her space and it’s not somewhere she invites people into idly, the process more painstaking and agonized over than most probably spend time contemplating. This is her space, her domain, her solace, and to let someone else into that is a barrier being shattered. Not something she takes lightly or without calculation. 

It’s Frankie though, beautifully maddening Frankie. Somehow that makes it okay, even through the first and tenth “nighty-night.” Even when Grace wakes up curled on her side with a mouthful of grayish brown hair. All of it flows so damn normally, that when Frankie shows up recurrently, it becomes a process expected and anticipated.

The blanket of night with stars poking through should be for quiet and and while it certainly is some aspect of their routine in the beginning, inevitability always cuts the solitude with sound.  

“You know what I find a real travesty, Grace,” Frankie says behind her. 

“The fact that a non-drug induced sleep is literally impossible since you joined my bedtime ritual and won’t stop talking, ever?” 

“The fact that I’m in my mid seventies and I never mastered the art of hula hooping,” Frankie continues. 

Grace scoffs, rolls over to look at Frankie. Apparently partaking in this ridiculous line of thought is somewhere she is willing to go tonight. 

“I’m thinking that picking it up now would be difficult. Rewarding perhaps, but afterward you’d have to have your hips redone,” she quips, quite proud of herself.

“I know, I know. But just think, Grace! Letting go of yourself on some level while completely controlling the object around you. Finding a precise rhythm to keep gravity from doing its job. The ultimate battle against inertia.” 

Frankie sighs, almost dreamily. Grace can’t dislodge the word "rhythm" from her brain or the idea of the movement of Frankie's hips, however innocuous. 

Seventy three years, she’s existed. Seventy three. Not once can she remember being this far consumed with an abstraction that gains more definition as time goes on, crafted and molded by none other than the woman lying beside her. 

Small, random thoughts creep like vine and Grace wonders where they were birthed from. Men have been the steadfast constant in her life. She’s indulged in them because it was the only option presented, the only feasibility. So why, over the last few years, has the tide turned to wondering about what it would be like to share a life, her heart, her body, with a woman? And not just any woman. Frankie. 

“It’s never too late to try anything, they say,” Grace offers quietly. A statement with a double meaning if ever there was one. 

Suddenly, Frankie is on her side too, staring into Grace. It seems a wonderful flight of fancy to just fall into the look she’s giving, to tuck herself in to it and be warmed by the feeling. 

_This fucking crush is going to be the end of me_ , Grace thinks. An absurdity at her age. And most definitely, beyond a shadow of a doubt, not love. That would be even more ludicrous. 

“Is that what they say?” Frankie questions, brings a hand up to trace along the curve of Grace’s arm, her hip, her leg. 

Burrowing deeper into her pillow, Grace lets the flooding mixture of arousal and comfort twirl within her. Containing either without vocalization become harder with each pass of Frankie’s hand, with each passing moment of the day. She isn't sure how much longer she can hold out.


	7. The Winding Down Third

There are a thousand other routes she’s sure she could have taken but Grace has never been one to go at things in a roundabout way. It’s always barreling straight ahead with a plan, with a laser sharp focus on the task at hand. In this case, it’s the phone nesting in its cradle driving her forward even though the pain in her lower back is searing.

She manages to get her shoulder as close to Frankie as possible before lifting her body up. The over part doesn’t go as smoothly as she plans and before she knows it, she’s collapsed on top of Frankie’s own distressed form. 

Breath leaves Frankie in a rush and Grace would like to feel even somewhat guilty for knocking the air out of her momentarily, but all she can process from the situation they’re in is how soft and warm Frankie is underneath her. She feels Frankie’s breasts meet and press against her own painfully, yet delightfully as she tries to shift her weight somewhat. Frankie’s hips connect to Grace’s at a slight angle and she tries to calm her breathing because just a little shift and she’d have her in an embarrassingly telling predicament. 

It’s like her body has gone rogue on her, like she’s lost control of her fine motor skills and any logical possession of thought. Maybe it’s been easy to ignore the bubbling, conflicting emotions so far but, my god, it’s impossible to ignore now. To dismiss her body’s sheer response to being this close in proximity to Frankie. To being on top of her. 

Her neural synapses seem to fray and burn out because suddenly, she’s not thinking about the fucking phone anymore. Just fucking in general, which she’s not done in quite some time and her body is screaming at her to remember it likes upon occasions. Which could so easily begin right here, right now on this stupid floor if their backs were cooperating with their bodies instead of reminding them they can’t be agile, middle aged adults anymore. 

Moving becomes her only priority, to disconnect her body from Frankie’s as soon as possible before she does something she knows she’ll absolutely regret later. Because so far, it’s been easy to push all of these conflicting emotions somewhere else and not face them. 

“Oh, Grace,” Frankie utters softly, reverently. 

“What?”

She wills her eyes to open, to respond and pretend that it’s perfectly normal to be on top of your best friend and feel utterly nothing when in reality she feels completely everything. 

“I know I don’t say this enough. But you are a striking woman.” 

Grace is wiped, tumbled, knocked over. 

“Well thank you,” she hears herself say, partially in disbelief that Frankie has given such an open and free compliment, the other part of her not knowing what to say. 

She knows if she stays where she is, Frankie will feel her heart practically beating out of her chest and she really doesn’t want to explain why it has decided to go off to the races. With all of her willpower, she manages to move her chest slightly to the side and remove her arms from either side of Frankie’s body, instead coming to connect with the cool wood of the floor on her left side. 

She slowly drags her body across Frankie’s form, her hips easing off of the body under her and coming to land fully on the other side of bliss and embarrassment. Grace remains face down, panting, trying to slow the erratic beating of her heart, both from exertion and the plethora of emotions she just experienced.

This is all becoming too much, a series of unfortunately wonderful events. For a brief second, the way Frankie looked at her, she can almost convince herself that maybe this isn’t all one sided, that perhaps her  _ crush _ isn’t really just hers at all. How lovely it would be to be mutually shared. 

Daydreaming of futures far off, however lovely, must wait. A closer one is looming in which they both need to be off the floor and upright for. Her imagined future with Frankie will have to wait. The one for Vybrant takes precedence now. 

*****

Sitting on the bench in the dress retail shop catapults Grace back forty five years. As she feels Robert’s shoulder brush against her own, something solid to tether her to the today, she can’t help but fall into the past.

The first time she’d seen the women, she’d been met with a scowl. 

Grace had tried on ten different outfits, scrutinized shade after shade of lipstick and nail polish, piece after piece of jewelry. All to create the perfect ensemble, to provide the picture of poise. To be so damn enticingly breathtaking, that not one person in the room could utter a flaw.

But Robert’s mother had peered through her as if she were glass, picked her apart and prodded her insecurities out, laying waste to everything Grace had worked so well to hide. 

The woman, if anything, lacked pretentiousness and obviously had never met a lick of sugar in her day, instead a barbed spear ready to let go on a moment's whim. 

Grace was floating forlornly in a vodka martini when his mother turned to her, taking the chance to look Grace up and down really well before Robert could come back and shield her. 

“I know Robert insists on making you a part of the family, and I can certainly see why he is so adamant about that,” she sniffed, gazing judgmentally over Grace’s thin and perfect body.

It was not a compliment. Grace knew this from the second it was uttered. Taking another drink, she tried to swallow the bile rising. 

“You aren’t right for him,” she continued. It upended Grace, the venom in it. (But now, looking back, how spot on had she been?) 

The glass grew harder to hold on to in her hand, her tongue harder to refrain as well. Blood roared in her veins and the pulse of her heart was loud in her ears. 

“In fact…” the barrage never ceased. “I’m not sure if any man will ever make you happy.” 

In the present, she feels Robert nudge her as he makes his way to the register. Hadn’t she loved him though? Hadn’t she felt fulfilled with the births of Brianna and Mallory, lives that he helped to create and give her?

Grace’s musing is shattered when her phone vibrates in the pocket of her navy blazer. 

_ Any luck finding burial clothes for a toad? _ the text reads. 

Grace bites back a laugh, feels a lightness blooming in her chest. She refuses to admit that her ex mother-in-law’s words ring true again-no man has ever made her as happy as she is now, with this life she has crafted from ruins. Her life with Frankie.

*****

The smell of pot hits her nose the second she walks into the door from being with Robert all day. Removing her blazer and draping it across the chair nearest her, she begins her hunt for Frankie, which isn’t too hard given the doors leading to the beach are wide open.

Grace stops for a moment to watch the smoke gently dance in the air lazily, like it doesn’t quite want to leave the atmosphere away from Frankie. It’s in this moment Grace finds herself oddly identifying with the inanimate tendrils, drawn to the magnanimity of life sitting before her. Having been inordinately pulled so much closer than she could ever imagine wanting to be after so many years of dodging, tolerating, and ignoring.

To have come this far and to feel this way, whatever way it is, so indefinable as of yet within her, seems like a lifetime away from their first meeting, the PTO run in, the purchasing of the very place in which they now dwell together. Getting past the mistrust and annoyance, what feels like eons since the Say Yes Night and rejected offerings of altered consciousness by the object resting between Frankie’s fingers currently. 

“Are you going to Bogart that thing or what?” emits a surprised look from Frankie’s face and she hands it over with little pomp. “Brianna taught me some pot words.”

Grace takes a drag, subconsciously trying to sound and look cool to a woman who probably was the class clown in school and who sat on parked cars, while she herself was putting on a show so all the popular girls would love her. While Frankie was no doubt omitted from the “in” crowd, Grace is sure that everyone loved her for her quirkiness and non-conformity. Much the same reason she has morphed into this person willing to do screwball things for the last year-to gain the favor of a woman she wasn’t supposed to like in the first place. To a woman she has forbidden herself to love. 

They small talk about the scarf and Robert, a bridge worth mending now that they’re past the sting and hurt of humiliation. Frankie mentions hating him forever but to Grace, forever seems not so long when their time is all but diminished anyway. To hold a grudge at this point seems downright asinine anyway. 

“What are you thinking about?” Grace questions, curious as to Frankie’s uncharacteristic quietness. 

A beat. “Balloons,” is the answer. 

“It’s never a straight line with you, is it?” Grace shakes her head. Because no, it never will be. Frankie is a curve, a twirl, and jumble of conundrum that drives her maddeningly, deliriously up a wall. Which she wouldn’t have any other way. 

“No,” Frankie sighs, takes a drag. She turns to look at Grace and there’s a tangible sadness to her that Grace hasn’t seen in ages. One that she’s always been trash at fixing. With pot in her system now, being a Dr. Phil to Frankie tonight probably will end up as a lost cause. 

“What?” Grace asks softly, locking her eyes with the melancholy ones focused on her. 

Frankie’s mouth opens but then is quickly closed again. Her nostrils flare as she takes in a heavy breath and releases it, waving the hand with the joint through the air in an exasperated manner. 

“I’m having an existential crisis,” is all she offers, to which Grace has to roll her eyes. 

“What this time? Did they change the drive thru hours at Del Taco again?” 

“No, no,” Frankie says in irritation, waving her hand again. She takes another long drag, holds it for several exceedingly long seconds, and lets it escape out of her again. “Probably more than we should be getting in to at this hour anyway.”

“There’s a lot of stuff I could get into at this hour,” is Grace’s retort, and when she looks at Frankie, she knows she’s got the truth written all over her face.  _ You. I could get into you.  _ She snaps her gaze away to grab at the joint again, removing it from Frankie’s fingers in an effort to distract from the slicing honesty behind her words. 

Frankie stares at Grace like she’s never seen her before, not until this exact moment, peeled and laid out for her. The look of despondency a few minutes ago is clouded over with something else, something almost tangible. Like if Grace really wanted to reach out and touch, she would find what it is, existing as a part of Frankie. 

The pot between her fingers shouldn’t be doing this, making her so honest. She should be wanting to laugh at the ridiculousness of everything, of her day with Robert and how her ex-mother-in-law would be rolling over in her grave if she could see her now, making veiled passes at the woman she’d never wanted to like in the first place. 

Before Grace can process, Frankie is so close to her she can feel the heat radiating off of her body. She briefly lays her head on Grace’s shoulder and removes the joint from the hand nearest her. Then, soft and warm lips are on Grace’s cheek and she swears she is going to hyperventilate because is Frankie taking her comment seriously?

The kisses become a trail, stacked upon one another, and yes, Grace is almost sure she’s going to die if this keeps going. Her damn hands are vice gripping the fabric of the pillow beneath her when they’d like nothing more than to reach out and start sketching the outline of Frankie’s body. 

In front of her face, a flicker of cinder and ash, the discarded pot landing on the walk near them, barely smoldering. Unlike whatever is happening right now, Frankie’s hand following the curve of Grace’s thigh, her hips, her side, her face. 

“Goodnight, Grace,” is whispered barely audible.  Frankie stands and Grace feels a radiating loss, not sure exactly what’s being taken away. 

She turns as she watches Frankie make her way through the beach house, listens as she hears the door close leading to the studio, aches as she realizes she’s reached the cusp of more than either of them can handle at the moment. 

*****

Life tends to be full of metaphors, some poignant while others border on camp, relying too heavily on hyperbole and heavy sentiment. Whether it be hurdles or mountains or whatever roadblocks that can befall a life, a saying exists for all of it. 

So goes the way of the business, box after box crammed into their dining space. She’s only one person with hands that can only do so much before osteoarthritis stills them to aching appendages. Popping pain pills and having a drink can’t get rid of the soreness though. They can’t bring back the functionality she needs for curling her fingers to unpeel stickered labels. Or to choke the life from Frankie for finding every excuse not to offer much needed assistance. 

Loving someone does not excuse them from violent thoughts or tendencies. For as many of Frankie’s eccentricities that Grace has learned to cherish, a line of equally exasperating ones exist as well. The hampering of motivation comes to mind at the present moment. That inherent lack of motivation is what is keeping her from finishing all of the orders that keep her inbox dinging with invoices. 

Even when she invites their doofus ex-husbands to help, Robert provides little more help than Frankie and Sol brings up things she’d rather not talk about. If Grace had any answers about her failed relationships with men, she probably wouldn’t be living with Frankie. Or maybe she would and the course of everything would be so unbelievably altered as to make since instead of being what it is.

“This is enough for me,” she responds and means it. Suddenly, she’s too close to admitting to something she hasn’t entirely worked out for herself yet. To admit that her life, her business with Frankie is enough for the rest of time unending. To utter that to Sol would be a disaster. 

But then there is Frankie, giving her this frieghtened look and she feels the panic start to creep into her chest as Robert offers a small shake of his head and holds his hands up. 

“What’s this about?” she hears her voice ask, sounding disconnected from the rest of her. She feels lost within herself as the worry etches deeper into Frankie’s face.

“Santa Fe.” 

Grace feels her heart fall out of her chest. This good thing they’ve got going, this thing that’s theirs and surrounding them on the tables and chairs and in all of her fucking being is crumbling to bits with every question she asks, every indefinite spoken by Frankie. 

It shouldn’t feel possible to exist and be lost at the same time, everything turning to a paradoxical farce. She’d just admitted that life with Frankie was enough and here is Frankie telling her she may go to Santa Fe to be with Jacob.

“Can we talk about this, please?” Frankie pleads. 

“Can you print some more labels, please?”

“Grace…”

“No. I...I can’t talk about this right now. So label, label, label.” 

God, she knows she deflecting, being the biggest jerk in the world because Frankie is looking at her like she can’t believe they can’t have this conversation right now, that Grace is refusing. All she can feel though is like she’s the loser in a game she couldn’t even play. It was futile hope that she would ever win the day. 

As the moments tick on, Grace’s tone becomes sharper and her words pare right to the bone, she knows. Anger and disbelief and panic swell and boil and she knows what she is doing to Frankie is inexcusable, almost as bad as her drunken bender from last year when she’d smeared a wrecked path of bitterness everywhere she went. Frankie being collateral damage. 

“We’ll talk about this in the morning, I guess?” Frankie asks as Grace tries desperately to send her on her way, another incongruity because the truth of the matter is she’s scared shitless to lose her. 

“Yeah.” 

When the door closes, she can bear it no longer. Her legs feel leaden, her insides scrambled to incoherence. Grace falls into her chair and the tears start to sting and burn, brought on immediately because of an ache to her core. A sob escapes her and she covers her mouth to stifle the sound.

_ Frankie’s leaving. Frankie’s moving. Frankie’s going to Santa Fe to be with Jacob and I’ll be stuck here alone, without her.  _

The words tumble and toss in her mind, a broken record repeating the same sound. There is no solace in the thoughts, only capsizing. 

Grace wishes she could throw every single box into the ocean, scream into the wind and curse her luck for trying to obtain even the smallest piece of happiness. Because apparently, when you’re Grace Hanson, happiness isn’t something that’s given. It’s something scalped and barren. It’s a broken-winged bird that cannot fly within her heart. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Last line shamelessly stolen from the Langston Hughes poem "Dreams." I used it in my professional life this week and felt it would end the chapter nicely.


	8. Closer to the End of the Third

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I just got done reading Jane Fonda's biography. In it, she talked about how she had been a dancer in her early years and how she gave it up when she got married and started doing movies. I stole that aspect and transplanted it into Grace's life. Because no matter how much Jane Fonda denies it, when you read her biography, you clearly see she is Grace.

Making it a point to avoid Frankie used to be the sole purpose of her relationship with the woman. Taking that instinct and flipping it on it’s tail after forty years is somewhat more difficult.

The dinner hour comes and goes and Grace skips the meal, still too raw to talk about the prospect of Frankie moving. She’d been so short with her, so succinct on the conversation looming. Looking around her room, she can’t help but feel lost and disappointed for resorting to her go-to, to building a wall in self defense so she can’t get slammed with anything that might render her worthlessly on the verge of tears.

She needs to escape, something to quiet her mind from the things she lacks domination of. As if floating lazily on a cloud, it comes to her in a wisp of a thought. One that’s been in a foggy haze for years.

Precision is something that Grace has practiced to master the art of her entire life. Not that it wasn’t instilled in her at an early age, because it was. The boarding school managed to knock any ideas of rebellion out of her until her later years, the regimentation just part of life, what one did to survive.

That regimentation flowed into her abilities too, into dance. She’s never once mentioned it to Frankie, never once told her that she knows how to bend and contort and control her body to a specified movement because she’s had years of training. She can close her eyes and remember the steps vividly, even though her limbs and the bones in them would protest wildly. Her ten year old body is still as crisp in her mind as ever, standing in front of the large mirror in the studio, slippers gripping her feet and Lycra covering her body.

When the music would begin, she was a transformation, a chameleon who had been walking through the halls of the school and was always blending in. With sound, she enveloped freedom in her actions, letting something else discipline her life instead. Ballet was different than the day to day routine of rigidity the school adhered to. Moving through the five basic positions to then bending and swaying to the music was an exercise in liberation. Grace was not just good at it, she excelled. She would wow audiences to silence with her ability and turn every other girl in the class to a jealous rage of longing.

For years, she danced. For years, she moved and lost herself in the motions because it felt good to let go. While no easy feat, the hours spent learning and aching and triumphing in ballet gave her the first escape she would go through. One that she would retreat to in moments when the world felt overwhelming and consuming. One that lasted well into her late twenties to early thirties, only abandoned after the discovering of the small lives encompassing her womb.

When Brianna and Mallory were born, the world shifted again. With them, a bit of her old life bled away slowly, a chip, a broken sliver deposited into a now waning past. Breastfeeding and diaper changing took precedence over dancing and personal expression. With each passing day, whoever Grace had been and whatever Grace was becoming, mother and wife, melded into the new version of herself.

In a quiet moment, when the girls would be asleep and Robert would be gone (again), where she could take a second to breathe and close her eyes, she could recall the steps and movements of her past. Could almost feel her body’s tug to remember what it was missing, how utterly impressive she had been at it. How unbound she had felt.

Tonight, she lets herself gravitate to in front of her mirror. The years are etched so acutely into her skin now and being ten years old, being twenty, seem like another life lived by someone else completely. Somehow, since then, she has lost that precision. That control. That finesse that used to exist with her life: The perfect blend of knowing and shaping the day, whether it be running her then newly crafted business, following the motions to be the parent all children aspire to have, or playing the role of a doting wife to a man who maybe never loved her in the first place.

The remote to her iHome sits perched on her dresser in front of her, mixed with the other various beauty products and items she uses to appear as if she has that control when the sun hits the horizon. But when the stars come out to burn and the moon hangs low, she feels she can let it all go and withdraw within herself. The retreat is something that she looks forward to every day. No more performing, whomever it may be for.

And lately, it has been for Frankie.

Grace laughs mercilessly at herself, the absurdity of it eating. To be conforming to a version of herself that barely can recognized anymore is another element where she feels her grasp dwindling. When you feel things, so deeply as Grace has lately, the potential of those things could set everything ablaze with chaos. Even with the possibility of Frankie and Santa Fe, she can’t let herself go enough to vocalize it.

That’s when it all hits her. She will risk it all, her own happiness and future of maybe learning to say exactly what she feels inside, if it means Frankie will get what she wants.

She will let go of every emotion tied to desire, to longing, to something now resembling love if it means Frankie will be happy. Grace will let go of them sitting a little too close at breakfast in the mornings, gripping their hands together during a particularly scary scene on their movie nights, discovering fresh tomatoes and basil from the small garden out back to cook with on the counter with a smiling face drawn and “my organic>theirs” scribed with beautifully looping script beneath.

Her hand migrates to the remote, eyes closed and folding into some not quite dormant sense memory of her past. She conjures up images, can feel the errant tug of will upon her limbs as the music begins, filling her ears with auditory ambiance. Before she knows it, she is moving to the sound, retracing steps she used to know better than the back of her own hand. How long has it been since she danced? How long has she tucked herself inside of something that doesn’t make sense and she’s been trying to make sense of it?

Three years, she thinks. When she moved in with Frankie. She bends and dips, sways and wishes she could do a battement frappé or entrechat. Those positions are a casualty of her age, of the osteoarthritis that consumes her bones. Tomorrow, she will ache but it will be sweet in its bitterness too. To just have this again, even for the briefest of moments. She dances for herself, for the piercing loss of Frankie she already feels even though it has yet to happen.

The music ends and Grace takes in a breath, the movements she did enough to get her heart working on overdrive. And when she looks up, another adage to her heart, Frankie standing on the outside of her bedroom door, visible in the small crack she’s opened.

“How long have you been standing there?” Grace asks, still slightly out of breath.

“Oh, Grace,” Frankie sighs, and the look on her face is a palette of emotions.

Perhaps that is why Grace can’t find it in herself to feel embarrassed at being caught. After all, it is her room and it is night. Her time in these hours and minutes should be just hers, but of course some of them belong to Frankie now, just like so much else that Grace can’t admit is also hers.

“Well…” Grace begins.

“Is this what you do when we say goodnight to one another?” Frankie questions, looks genuinely interested and awed at the same time.

“Among other things,” Grace quips, but then hears the salaciousness of the tone and sees Frankie’s face. “No, not...not a lot. I was just thinking about my childhood.”

“You’ve never told me much about it.”

“There’s not much to tell,” she huffs, sitting down on the bed. Frankie stands inside of the door now but makes no move to come closer. Grace doesn’t know whether to extend an invitation after the events of earlier today or whether that would be just as inappropriate as her suggestive comment.

As if she can stand it no longer, Frankie finally pads across the carpet to plop down beside Grace at the foot of the bed. She turns to face her and wears a look of awe.

“I had no idea you could dance like that. The way you moved your body, it was…” she begins excitedly then trails off toward the end of statement. “Mesmerizing” is how the sentence is finished.

Breath is becoming harder to inhale, that control Grace has worked so hard at, spiraling away. This has gone past a crush, past mere attraction. This is something lacking categorization, but a growing ache within her that needs to be fulfilled. Sometimes when she looks at Frankie, she swears Frankie is feeling it too, that undeniable pull to one another. And yet, Grace can’t bring herself to uncertainty.

“I was a dancer once, before…” Grace whispers.

“You keep unfolding like a flower,” Frankie smiles, the simile a powerful visual image. So much more unfolding, and blossoming that could occur here between the two of them. Doesn’t Frankie feel it too? She’s _got_ to. It’s unbearable almost in its weight. “You’re magnificent, Grace.”

“I’m just me,” Grace waves off, deflects. Silently begs Frankie not to destroy yet this other piece of her that she has given over without much of a fight. Not to take and take, then vanish to another state, leaving Grace forlorn. Idly, she wonders how much longer she has until Frankie has so many pieces of her, she won’t even have enough left for herself.

*****

She wakes early, bones and limbs aching with a reminder of her less than intelligent choices last night. The clock reads 5:09 and she can’t imagine going back to sleep at this point.

Slowly, she lumbers upright. A small gasp of crippling pain escapes her pressed together lips and she eyes the night stand beside the bed. Grabbing two Tylenol 3, she dry swallows them and pushes herself up to begin the day. Below, boxes await, a morose casualty of yesterday.

Looking at the cardboard under the faint glow of the kitchen light does nothing to dampen what she felt at the end of messing with them mere hours ago. She still feels like throwing them out the door, burying herself under the afghans on the couch and crying in the fetal position until she physically cannot anymore.

But then, Frankie would be winning. She would be side-swiping the business into shambles. Or Grace would. It’s hard at this juncture to think of Frankie as anything less than the scapegoat. Because is Grace the one leaving? Is Grace the one disappearing? No. This life, however fucked up looking to anyone on the outside, is exactly what she’s worked so hard to nab hold of for longer than a few increments of time.

Despite the aches and the acetaminophen doing little to alleviate some of the pain, she works her fingers to numbness, taping and sticking and stacking. Minutes tick and she slides into a trance-like stupor of nothingness except routine, of repetition. Before she knows it, her back is screaming but the boxes are all finished.

Grace decides to reward her hard work with a cup of coffee now that the sun has begun to coat the sky with swatches of orange and pink. While the aroma of the brew fills the air, she manages to knock out the cease and desist letter to the fuckers at OmniTech too.

Wistfully, the idea emerges that maybe Frankie could have added some clever comments to entertain Grace despite the seriousness of the letter’s tone. But that would be banking on the fact that life was going to continue, that the earth would turn exactly like it has for the last three years, that this morning would break and nothing would have changed. The declaration of Santa Fe would be a fleeting idea with little merit and that this essence would be enough to keep Frankie satisfied to Grace’s own level.

Walking to the back porch, she lets herself fall into the deck chair. Already worn from activity, she decides relaxing and surrendering her mind to a book may be the way to eschew the sadness away.

Yet it fails.

She’s staring out into space, heavy sighs wracking her body, when she hears a faint noise behind her. Instantly she knows who it is.

The hour is still early yet but the scent of Frankie is unmistakable, one that tugs at Grace in more than one place. Already, she misses this about her, the anticipatory longing already swirling in her chest for a day she knows she will no longer have it.

“Are we closed for some minor national holiday my “Minor National Holiday” calendar didn’t tell me about?”

Grace doesn’t want to admit she got up early and did all of the work so that she didn’t have to face hours of working alongside Frankie and pretending her heart wasn’t falling out of her chest. While she’s practiced her entire life at being stoic and not letting her emotions show, the last three years have worn at her like erosion, carving the old away to reveal something smaller and changed. Something actually capable of feeling.

She has to show Frankie the letter though because she is a part of the business. Even if she won’t be a part of the business when she abandons Grace and everything they’ve worked so hard to establish.

What she can’t find it in herself to do much more than that, to stop being shitty to Frankie regardless of how her emotions are running the gamut. They lace her tone with snotty venom, and she knows it has to hurt Frankie because it hurts her to speak them. Pain begets pain though, so it’s a different level she’s operating at instead of the one she can’t control.

She’s always been good at creating aches within her own body, to her own body. Sometimes it’s in the form of drinking herself until her form rebels against sobriety, becoming a mishmash of non functioning disparity. Other times, it’s rejecting nourishment to forgo the mutterings that plague older woman. “Oh, she let herself go.” “Have you seen how she’s filled out lately?” Grace refuses to be that woman. She leeches her body and heart of things to punish herself, turning her rage inward at times when she feels it threaten to boil over.

Frankie becomes another in a long line of others, emotionally ravaged by Grace’s bite and witticism, even if Grace feels more for her than she has ever felt for anyone else, ever. Maybe that’s why Grace does the things she does. Because even though she’s a walking hazard, she’s better than any Jacob’s or Santa Fe’s and what she’s given Frankie, what they’ve given each other over the past three years feels like what life should be about, even if sometimes there is a whisper within Grace that would like more.

So she says something snarky and disappears up the stairs before much more can be said that damages them beyond repair.

******

She’s read about trench warfare, about its role in the first World War. About how the defender has the advantage due to firepower, even when lacking mobility. To risk crawling out and going on the offensive could have disastrous consequences. That’s why she lies in wait, grabs Frankie’s uniform so they can see what they’re up against, an enemy well versed in tactical take down. A man who knows the long game.

Both she and Frankie have worked too hard to let Vybrant go to hell in a hand basket because one smooth talking, conceited blowhard couldn’t come up with his own idea and ripped theirs off for profit. Probably convinced that neither of them had the balls to fight back. If anything, showing this Nick Skolka how big her balls are is precisely what Grace is planning on doing, whatever it takes.

Frankie’s balls, however, are sucking all of the brain power from the gray matter between her ears because she’s not only running out of the trenches, she’s doing it unarmored. While Grace admires her piss and bravado, the end result is going to be a nightmare if she doesn’t shut her mouth.

She’s tried to play the man in front of her from the second her turned his greedy, lustful eyes on her. It’s not as if this is the first time she’s been looked at this way by a man. Reading him had been the easiest part of the whole experience up until Frankie blasted her coyness with a cannon and started berating. Damage control seems a far fetched idea at this point as she rattles off some more.

“You need to knock it off and stop cribbing our shit.”

The nuts must be powering her the way a chocolate bar does a toddler because Frankie is off to the races and no matter what approach Grace tries, she is slapped down. This can’t end well. This won’t end well. Omni-Tech could buy out their company and probably every other sex toy company she knows of, just to take their inventory, burn it, and laugh about how nice the bonfire is. Men like Nick Skolka have 1,500 thread count Egyptian cotton sheets they sleep on at night and private planes they take across the world to dominate other unfortunate souls. Grace doesn’t want Vybrant to be a pile of flames and dust by the time they walk out of the building.

“You are vile and your company is disreputable,” Frankie yammers on.

Then the word hits that Grace has been trying to avoid this entire time. _Court_. She watches as Nick offers her something of a sympathetic smile and makes the comment about seeing her again. When the glass door closes, the tension remains wound tight in the room, but Frankie doesn’t notice.

“Ah! This is great! I’m pumped,” Frankie smiles.

“Oh, that’s good. Cause we’re fucked.”

“Didn’t we come here today to stick it to this guy? To show him we won’t take any shit from anyone?”

Grace can hardly stand it anymore. To physically not reach out and strangle the life from Frankie is taking every ounce of restraint she has in her body. How odd the gamut of emotions can be, she bemuses. One minute you can be toeing a line that seems deliciously inviting to cross and the next, erasing the line altogether and contemplating the benefits of solitude because of a life in prison due to a crime of rage.

“Frankie, he probably owns someone whose job it is to shovel shit for him at regular interims. We just started Vybrant and this guy could sink our company before we even get off the ground really. But did you think of that? No. All you do is plunge forward with little regard because what does it matter if you’re leaving nothing behind? You don’t need this business because you’ll have Santa Fe and Jacob and whatever else hippie bullshit is waiting for you. This is all I have,” Grace aims, goes straight for the jugular.

She doesn’t even wait to see the hurt look on Frankie’s face or stop to listen to the sputtering coming from her mouth. She books it. She goes as fast as her legs will take someone of her age, away from this fucking building, this fucking nightmare of an experience. Grace knows Frankie is following her like a wounded animal not far behind but she doesn’t slow her steps. Just like at the incubator, she stomps her way to the car.

When she reaches it, she yanks the handle and then remembers she didn’t drive, that she can’t hide behind the steering wheel seething and keeping her hands busy wringing the bejesus out of something that isn’t her roommate. She lets out an exasperated moan and goes around to the passenger side as Frankie reaches the driver’s side.

Shoving a rogue curl behind her ear, she crosses her arms defiantly and glares in Frankie’s direction for only a split second, long enough to deliver a command. “Open the fucking door.”

It unlocks with a click and she slides in the exact opposite of her namesake, purse dragging a little between the door. Her shoe falls off too and she angrily bends to pick it up off the sweltering pavement before she slams the door and buckles her seat belt with the fury of someone who isn’t anywhere near cooling down.

Frankie opens her side and deposits herself in the seat. She looks like she wants to say something but Grace can’t bring it in herself to ask. The engine starts to the car and they leave the parking lot, mercifully heading home. Grace just wants to put the experience behind her, shut herself in her room and down an exorbitant amount of alcohol to forget this disaster of an afternoon. Lately, it’s not been so great at numbing her into a stupor, but it still manages to take out a sting.

“I don’t know why you’re so mad at me,” Frankie comments, slashing through the silence.

“I’m mad at you because I had him exactly where I wanted him!”

“Where? In 1961 at the Playboy Mansion?”

Grace resents the remark a little bit. Frankie was right-it had been a power play. But before she could rip that power from the man’s hands, it had destroyed from any possibility.

“Oh, I know how to handle guys like that. I’ve been doing it my whole life. And just because I was going to dinner with him doesn’t mean it was going any further.”

 _Because it can’t_ , she wants to say. _Because I can’t carry on with anyone else without thinking of you. I can’t function without wishing everyone was you and your maddening ability to make me feel so bowled over but completely, insanely invested in a future with you. One that doesn’t exist anymore...because of Santa Fe._

None of that gets uttered, but it threatens to spew out. When Frankie mentions fixing it, Grace can’t hold some of it back.

“There’s no more ‘we’ll.’ Half of ‘we’ll’ is abandoning me.” God, she sounds petty. She sounds pathetic. She sounds exactly like what she’s refused to admit she is for the past year and a half since her feelings went haywire and Jacob became competition, not acquaintance.

Frankie is right. She’s tried to start crafting a life out of solitary necessity. She has to get used to a life where she is alone again, just like she was with Robert. Because no matter what Frankie says, Grace knows she’s leaving. She can feel it so profoundly, it shakes her bones. While certainly not easier, it feels a bit like chastising herself for letting whatever she feels for Frankie be born into existence.

“Don’t you understand? This is an impossible choice. I don’t want to lose Jacob. I don’t want to lose you,” Frankie says, her voice giving way to emotion.

Grace’s heart flutters like a moth. Then it throbs. She wants to tell Frankie she has so much to say about all of this, that she feels things so acutely between the two of them, that vocalizing it is more than even she thinks she can get out. Which is why she doesn’t. Which is why she lets silence bend her chords to disuse and lets the secrets rest squarely in her chest. She won’t take Santa Fe from Frankie. Not if Frankie feels like she needs it.

“There’s nothing to talk about until you decide if you’re going to run off with your boyfriend!” comes out of Grace’s mouth and she hears the passive aggressive nature to it immediately.

A verbal slap hits her across the face when Frankie mentions Phil, the only person she’s ever come close to caring for as fully as the woman sitting beside her. It’s another ache in this unfortunate series, a stack compiling a volume almost by this point.

She’s telling Frankie to turn but nothing happens. When Grace turns to see the look on Frankie’s visage, she feels the rest of what’s left of her heart shatter and crack.

 

 


	9. The Deviation at the End of the Third

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This penultimate chapter officially begins the cannon deviation. (So warning on that if cannon is your thing) I still use some events that happen, but even my next chapter will be loose cannon as well. I have it mostly written too, but it just needs the loose ends tied up. Something big is happening on Monday though, so my time will be limited to say the least. I will try to have it up before the end of the month though and this fic will be complete.
> 
> ***Heavy angst warning ahead but again, this will all end well. I promise.

**Chapter 9**

She knows that death is an inevitability, for both of them, but she never thinks about it really. It seems too morbid a thing to dwell on, especially when it comes for everyone eventually. The last thing she expects is to have traces of it curling around either of them at a stop sign in the passenger seat of a clown car.

She sees the pained expression freeze across from her, immobility seizing and stopping. Terror strikes and it feels as if she is moving through a jello like haze, too slow to be of any good. _I’m losing her_ , she thinks as she stabs at the now no longer ridiculous panic alert in front of them, the only thing that can help Frankie.

The minutes feel like hours as she waits for the ambulance to show. Meanwhile, all she can do is unbuckle her seat belt and lean across the console, holding Frankie’s shoulder and latching on for dear life despite the position she’s in. Her fingers rake across the curve of Frankie’s face as she holds her, whispers to her that everything is going to be okay, it will all be okay. A small sound escapes Frankie and Grace can’t bring herself to look, can’t glance up from staring at the floorboard and hoping against all hope that she isn’t listening to her best friend stop breathing.

She isn’t sure how long it takes but there’s a knocking on the glass of the driver’s side window and the door is opening. Grace leans back and doesn’t even remember the two tears forming in her eyes that leak out and trickle down her face. The blonde is flashing a pen light in Frankie’s eyes and Grace exits the car in a whoosh. Breath leaves her like lead and she stands pacing on the curb while the young woman assesses what she’s dealing with.

Frankie eventually moves, walks from the car as if she were never frozen. She throws a small smile toward Grace’s direction and the way she carries herself makes Grace all the more incredulous. It’s like nothing’s happened. Frankie tells jokes, sings songs, acts like she didn’t just scare them both shitless because of whatever the hell it was that just occurred.

Deception is sneaky but Grace knows, just _knows_ , that Frankie playing this off as mere happenstance couldn’t be further from the truth. She needs a doctor, a hospital, medical care. When the taxi passes by, she has to all but sprint to the car, waving off the paramedic who is shaking her head in disbelief.

Driving home feels like being on autopilot. Grace is too old to be playing this game, to be chasing the girl around the playground so she can pull her pigtails to let her know she likes her. Although she never did it, she can see the comparison to what she’s doing now.

“Embrace love, light, and the possibility of a better tomorrow,” Frankie’s mp3 of herself says.

That would all be wonderful, Grace thinks, except nothing about it is easy. Embracing Frankie is all she has thought about for the last solid year, holding her and telling her all the pent up warmth and affection she’s been reining back on.

“Pass,” Grace grumbles. As if that’s an option. As if it won’t all come back around to stagger her heart again. She’d love to pass on the emotions she’s felt every day for the last however many days but the impossibility of it rattles her even further.

She pulls into the drive, not really paying attention to the way she parks. Dragging her body out of the car seems like a feat in and of itself. The weight of everything is all encompassing and it sits heavily on her shoulders.

This day. This fucking day. It drags on and on and Grace would really like to see its end soon but all it feels like is that she keeps waking up to experience the same bullshit, destined to be Bill Murray living existence on repeat until she can figure out just how to fix the kink that’s rippled the time continuum.

Now she is watching Frankie lie in a pile of crystals, hearing some guy hum incoherent chants over her body, smelling tea that had the aroma of something that came out of the back end of an equally unpleasant thing only to be digested again...she’s doing all of this wacky, over the top bullshit because Jacob is going along with it. And if Jacob can indulge Frankie’s wild flights from any solid, sane reality, Grace can too.

But then they’re at the hospital because Frankie’s finally admitting, her spastic healing guru admitting, that something is genuinely wrong. Jacob disappears, mercifully, for a few moments while they wait for the doctor. Frankie has done nothing but resist Grace’s well intended concern, buffering her every chance to help.

Grace sits quietly, without nagging, beside Frankie and waits. Listens to the ticking of the heart monitor and the huffing of breath coming from Frankie, whom she can feel casting glances every few seconds in her direction. Like she wants to say something but pride is suspending her tongue.

“Oh, for fuck’s sake. We might as well conversate  if we are going to sit here for the next twenty years, waiting on the doctor to come back,” Frankie finally huffs.

“About what? You made it fairly clear you didn’t want me interfering,” Grace shoots back, again sounding sulky.

“Excuse me, Mrs. Disquietude. I wasn’t aware you wanted much to do with me anymore since I have a way of stuffing my mouth full of nuts and telling asshole’s where they can cram theirs,” Frankie begins, then seems to think better of her word choice and stops. “After all, you’ve been bent out of shape with me ever since I spoke the words Santa Fe.”

Grace feels an exasperated sigh escape her. She doesn’t want to do this again, doesn’t want to focus on the thing that maybe is the biggest matter floating between them but pales in comparison to what’s going on right this second.

“You know that’s a load of shit, Frankie. I’m doing all of this _because_ you are going to Santa Fe. So I can learn to be on my own.”

“I love how I mention going to Santa Fe, just mention it, and you’ve already packed my bags before I’ve had time to convene with the goddess, meditate a while, and consult all Yelp reviews on local fare. I’d say that’s jumping the gun a bit, don’t you? Or am I really dead and you’ve been put as my power of attorney.”

Frankie taps the heart monitor beeping away. She shoots Grace a look that is somewhat of a challenge. Something reading along the lines of, _Come on. Say something. I dare you._

Grace’s feet suddenly develop interest because she can’t meet Frankie’s eyes. She so desperately wants to leap and gush forth what’s been building and growing like an invasive species inside her chest cavity. Instead of weeding it out, extinguishing it altogether, she’s only picked on the surface and allowed root to take form. Now it’s impossible to get out of her system for good.

“Maybe this is all I know to do with you,” she ends up whispering, divulging. “Maybe, right now, this is all I know to give you.”

 _Give you advice, give you space, give you a broken form of love that is so flawed as to feel completely like something else._ The sentence could mean a myriad of things, but Grace doesn’t clarify and Frankie doesn't ask for more. Which is fine and well because she isn’t sure what’s left for Frankie to have.

The air in the room feels tight and strangling. Frankie watches her hawk-like, as if she too is on the precipice of saying whatever is rolling around in her brain.

Jacob enters then holding two cups of coffee. Grace doesn’t have to be a rocket scientist to know she’s been left out, an afterthought. A dusty puzzle piece hauled out from under the couch, trying to fit into a picture where she doesn’t belong and hasn’t the whole time.

Things of this nature shouldn’t bother her, but she feels them, _God_ does she feel them. Grace knows that life isn’t fair but lately, this side role of hers just feels downright callous in its physicality.

What’s one to do when one has been playing the role for too long? She knows it so well by this point that even in its callousness, she wears it like an old coat of familiarity. Which is why she stands, butts around Jacob to tuck the covers underneath Frankie. To just touch her period and make sure that she’s really real and not an apparition or spectral form.

Conflict is not best left to those who face it. It is better tackled with force and solidarity. While Jacob might be this force to some degree, he still has his farm and yams and Grace has Frankie. So she can adapt and mold to be the mentor of overhauling life choices if it means Frankie will continue to wake up every day, no matter where her head rises from, La Jolla or some sweltering desertscape away from here.

A stroke. It’s a bitter pill to swallow but Grace is bound and determined that the third time will not be Frankie’s charm. It will never seek her, never need to, because Grace can shield her from it all. All Frankie has to be willing to do is let her. Which, if she’s learned anything at all, might be easier said than done.

*******

They fight, but what else is new? She goes through her nightly routine after the blow up with Frankie in a daze. How long had she leaned against the boards of the studio and let the tears stream down her face, letting them come unbidden and fall so freely?

The impulse to turn on her heels and trek back to Frankie had been so overwhelming, it took everything she had to muster up the strength to go and get Jacob who was sitting on a lounge chair by the pool, staring into the water.

His presence had surprised Grace, even though subconsciously she had known he’d be _somewhere_ , waiting. The faint glow of illumination from the house danced off the water and in any other moment, mixed with the moonlight, she might have found the moment beautiful. Looking at Jacob dully, eyes still puffy and red from crying, her voice had been lost within her and she was only capable of hooking a thumb back in the direction from which she’d come.

She had done was she was told to do. Exit stage right, villain be damned. Enter stage left, the chivalrous prince in the chariot, protecting the poor heroine from the fleeing wench.

The recent events clutter and crowd her psyche, unable to be washed away by tears or steam or bitter resolve. Frankie doesn’t want her help.

Motions, followed through but not cataloged for recollection. Removal of her gray sweater, shedding skin and stripping away to raw flesh and bone. Standing in front of the mirror looking whole, but feeling broken.

Suddenly, Grace’s mind flits to an idea. To the potential truth of her actions. To her creation in a chain of love notes, letters left scattered in the only way she knows how. While she can’t say “I love you” back (even though it’s Frankie’s second nature), her vocalizations remain silent, yet present. She lets the actions speak through her, for her.

The strand begins with the covers around Frankie at the hospital so that even though she’s been through the ringer, the sheets can feel like a soothing envelope. It continues with the pamphlets placed precisely in a spot she knows Frankie’s eyes will befall. It’s hiding the tater tots at the back of the freezer because she just can’t bring it in herself to throw them away, knows that Frankie will be forlorn when she sees them in the wastebasket. Perhaps the hide and seek while dissuade her interest in them.

Shadows dance across the ceiling when Grace flicks the light off and she watches the hours burn away, the heavy ache settling in her chest. Tick, tock.

Restlessness gets the better of her after midnight and she feels as if she simply cannot sit still a moment longer.

Gazing down to the studio, she sees no light on. She knows, knows, she shouldn’t, but she does. Descends the stairs and makes her way across the path to where Frankie is.

This is taking a big chance. Jacob could be there. Frankie could see her walk through the door and immediately throw her out. But Grace has to do something.

Mercifully, luckily, the studio sits in solitude as Grace tries to enter without making a sound. With the stealth of a ninja, she gently closes the door behind her and makes her way over to the pull out bed that Frankie’s sleeping form rests upon.

She’s on her side and the gray and brown strands fall across her face. A pillow lies tucked under her arm and a blanket haphazardly strewn across her body, feet sticking out of the end. A snore escapes her and she shifts a bit in her sleep.

Grace has been in her company before at night, after the burglary. Had spent hours like these tucked into the shell of Frankie’s body, warmth pulling her back.

If she closes her eyes, Grace can still remember the way Frankie had felt against her. It’s that feeling that causes her to bend down, even though her knee screams out in protest.

She’ll regret this tomorrow, need Icy Hot and ibuprofen to make it through. But now, right now, the only thing that matters is the person in front of her. A person she so easily could have lost today.

Grace lets herself indulge then. Her long fingers reach out to brush the flowing locks back from Frankie’s visage, to revel in the features of a face she was never sure she would ever learn to appreciate. One that used to chagrin her to look upon.

Slowly, delicately, she traces the curve of Frankie’s cheek down to her chin. Feather light touches that are to be left unnoticed, to remain guiltily stolen and never mentioned.

“I almost lost you today,” Grace whispers to Frankie, to God, to no one.

Next, she pulls the thin blanket back over the bulk of Frankie. Finding her way to a nearby chair, she sits and watches the rise and fall of her chest. Gratefully, wonderfully, watches her best friend simply breathe.

In, out, in, out. Life force rushing and reversing. The lull of it relaxing Grace for the first time in what feels like a blur of a day. No microscopic cars with minuscule amounts of oxygen. No frozen features or panicked, shaking fingers. No crystals or fucking constellation energy tea or hospitals. No Jacob. Just Grace and Frankie. Like it has been for the past three years. Like it should always be.

At some point, sleep claims her. It’s dreamless in its arrival and stay. The next morning breaks with angry joints and muscles, pissed from curling her body into a too small chair barely meant for sitting, much less sleeping. She’d meant to only stay for a few minutes, to make sure everything was okay.

The blanket Grace had tucked Frankie under falls to the floor as she moves and glances toward the empty couch across from her. Frankie woke up and found her here. Who then left her, alone.

When she sees Frankie standing in the kitchen, she’s reluctant to move quickly. Everything she knows to say withers within and she’s back to her chain, actions to speak for words.

“Good morning” she offers, watching as Frankie tosses back a handful of pills.

They slip, they fall, they ease back into the molds from whence they came. Neither mention the fight. Neither mention the studio. Neither mention still caring when they are both sure that the capacity to do so has fractured and cracked on the ground.

Neither admit that between them, _too much_ is why they’re actually here.

*******

They’re standing in a God forsaken field which would stir up the allergies of even the mildest of sufferers, yet Grace can’t get them out of it and above it because Frankie has a death grip on her hand and feels like an immovable object that even Boniva couldn’t help her drag.

There is the balloon, full of color and wonder, the thing Frankie says she’s dreamed up and what Grace had been so eager to give to her, even if it is a re-gift.

She wants to ask her, when the fuck did you starting listening to what I tell you to do? But then Frankie is asking her what she’s so afraid of and it’s hard to keep it from tumbling out of her.

“Um...” she begins, so close to just uttering what she really wants to tell her. _Please don’t go. I can’t imagine life here without you. I’m pretty sure I’m in love with you._ It takes a moment to stomp it out from burning in her, to douse the ember of truth glowing so faintly deep within.

Even when faced with the possibility of overwhelming loss, she still can’t bring herself to say it, at least not straightforward anyway. A cruel irony considering the facts of it would make her anything but. It’s been hard enough to admit that all of these confusing and leveling feelings could even be anywhere close to romantic. She’s not supposed to be this way. She’s not Robert and Frankie isn’t Sol. The stories for them aren’t supposed to bookend neatly and be happily ever after. Right?

So instead, she loads her reasons, laces them with all the vestiges of her hopes and wishes that she never believed in until Frankie taught her how. Out of everyone she knows, Frankie is better with the unsaid than anyone. A self proclaimed emotional wizard who seems to miss every signal Grace can throw without coming outright and saying it.

As she’s staring out over the coast of California, tucked in the bittersweet solace of Frankie’s arms, she can’t help but feel like she’s missed her mark.

Regret begins to etch into her, so fine and delicate that she can’t even enjoy the way their bodies are connected and molded into one another. All Grace can think about are the should-haves. _I should have told her exactly what I felt. I should have held her hand when I wanted to just now. I should have been brave enough to let go of all my shit._

They float and float, and when the balloon starts to descend, Grace feels like everything is coming to an end. The ground could open up into a gaping maw and she wouldn’t care a bit, all because she knows Frankie is going to Santa Fe, has known it since the second it was uttered over the mountain of boxes and labels in their home. And can she blame her for wanting a bigger life than just their little old lady business and Grace for the rest of her days? Shouldn’t Grace want the same thing?

As they walk down the hill together, dusk begins to touch the horizon. Soon the crickets will sing and nightlife will stir while the day dies again. It feels like something oppressing closing in, something strangling the hope from Grace and dooming her to a metaphorical life of darkness for the rest of her years.

No Frankie. Not even in California, in a completely fucking different state. A strangled cry emits from her and she sways a bit, losing her footing. Frankie reaches out for her but a nearby tree catches her balance for her again. Tears flow down her cheeks, unbidden, and she weeps openly, embarrassingly.

“I can’t do it, Frankie. I can’t do it,” she apologizes, grabbing Frankie and pinning her against the bark.

Grace seems to loom over Frankie, either from her own anguish or Frankie’s fear, she isn’t sure. She knows she’s being too rough but she pins their bodies together with vehemence and warning for what she’s about to do, what she’s about to give herself over to.

The kiss isn’t soft or romantic. It’s aggressive and needy and Grace can feel Frankie absolutely frozen underneath her as she moves her lips, trying to capture and possess. She’s such a fucking asshole, she knows, because Frankie has Jacob and if Grace were any type of good, moral person, she’d stop all of this right now instead of pressing her breasts against Frankie’s and trying not to whimper in shame and need.

 _This is what you get for making me tickle your arm on Say Yes night, for insisting on being in my bed after the break in, for giving me a compliment as I was on top of you instead of telling me to hurry and move_ , Grace thinks. _This is for making me feel again._

When she backs away from Frankie and leans her forehead against her, panting, she can’t help but feel a hollow, bitter sense of accomplishment for finally letting the woman in front of her know the truth.

“What the fuck, Grace,” Frankie breathes, sounding resolute. It never ends up a question, just an accusatory statement.

“I say what I need to say because it’s the right thing, Frankie. I’m selfish though. All of this time, I’ve given and given because I think it’s right, but all I’m doing is punishing myself.” Frankie still doesn’t move and now, it’s really twilight and Grace doesn’t have to imagine what darkness would feel like anymore. It’s here.

“I guess it seems like when I get something I want, I manage to destroy everything in my wake,” she blindly continues, easing herself to a less brutal position with the two of them. Frankie finally opens her eyes to stare at Grace, her hand coming to trace her lips that will surely be sore any moment.  

“Jacob. Santa Fe,” Frankie says, sounding lost and staring at Grace’s mouth. It’s enough to send a thrill of hope through her and she keeps her hand around Frankie’s waist and one palm resting against the tree behind them.

“I know. I’m so fucking sorry but I couldn’t let another day go by and not tell you. I couldn’t keep pretending that when you touch me, I don’t feel the world in it, here,” Grace tells her, letting her hand leave the brace on the tree and bringing it to her heart. “That when we talk about how things are going with the business, I don’t have to hold it all together and stuff it down. That when we talk about test runs or modifications or anything else, I can’t help but feel it physically too. I know we aren’t Robert or Sol and I never intended to end up this way. To be like this. But it’s happened and you’ve changed everything I’ve ever felt about anyone.”

Now Frankie is crying and looking lost, like it’s absolutely going to break her to tell Grace what’s been coming down the pike since Grace pinned her against this tree. And Grace can do nothing but wait for it to happen.

“I owe Jacob a chance. I owe Santa Fe a chance. I’ve got to try this.”

“But why? We could have our own chance, if you’d just stay here. I’d do anything. Anything,” Grace pleads, sounding pathetic and fragile.

“Jacob’s a safe choice, Grace.”

“And I’m not?”

Frankie looks at her sadly, reaches behind her body to grasp Grace’s hand and remove it from her hip. Her fingers lace them both together for a brief moment as she kisses each knuckle softly, making Grace melt.

“Honey, you never have been.” With that, Frankie drops their hands and walks off toward the car, shoulders slumped.

Grace feels like she’s in mourning for something she never had. For losing a game she never was officially playing. She watches as Frankie disappears into the distance.

Tomorrow will dawn empty with Frankie on her way to Santa Fe and Grace an empty shell in her bed.


	10. The Culmination

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And so we reach the end. Thank you to everyone who clicked to give a "kudos" or took the time to write a review. You were all so especially kind which makes me want to continue to write for this fandom. Hope you all enjoy this final chapter. See you in my other fics, hopefully.

 

 It’s been over a month since she’s spoken to Frankie. Not like it’s any surprise though. When you kiss your unwilling best friend and declare your unrequited love, things like this are bound to happen. Except Grace can’t feel anything but remotely shocked by it.

Frankie has always forgiven her, for everything. Maybe this time though, it’s just too big to let go of. Hell, she would herself if she could. It would be so easy to wish what she feels for Frankie away and to backtrack to a time and place before she let her senses get the best of her.

If Frankie had seemed hesitant about the trip before the balloon, Grace had all but propelled her into Jacob’s arms after it. It’s emotional fallout, a wrecked friendship sitting in a chasm of rubble and grit. Nothing is clean and safe anymore. A dangerous, flawed, and crumbled thing that for the life of her, Grace can’t figure out how to fix.

What does one say? _I’m sorry I fell in love with you while we were just simply existing and then shoving you against a tree to then physically overwhelm you?_ Even though Grace is fairly sure she read the signs, navigated them correctly after denying their presence to begin with. Sure, Frankie ran but she’s almost positive they’re in dead space and white noise because Frankie felt a little too deeply too.

Hours turn to days which turn to weeks. Time continues on without regard and she has to move through the motions because giving up isn’t an option. She takes to packing boxes one minute, filters to sipping a martini another, glances ruefully at the clock the next.

Absence and silence have both given Grace a lot of time to think about what’s transpired, what’s been gained and ultimately what’s been lost. You can’t repair something that doesn’t want to be fixed, so Grace has had to shift her attention in life back to the other things that always were present, even before Frankie waltzed into her life.

There are things you notice in solitude that don’t quite appear in moments of companionship, of presence.  
  
The way the house has a distinct creak that makes it feel a little more empty when the wind whips up from the north across the Pacific. The way her reflection catches her when she only means to breeze past like normal, the two of them in a stare down in which she finds too many flaws, lines, imperfections, and emotions. The up-until-now-unnoticed echo of any life she tries to inject in the house solely by herself.  
  
It’s as if her entire life whispers to her about the absence of Frankie, in one way or another. She’s physically missing in their home, emotionally missing from her children’s lives, and what feels like a leveling omission from every facet of Grace’s well being.  
  
It’s odd to try and piece together a life into something of substance when all she wanted in the past was one without Frankie to begin with. _You wanted this not so long ago_ , she chastises herself. Allows for a moment of self loathing for the disgusting thought too.  
  
Everyone knows that she’s not good at feelings, that she drowns in emotions. Her daughter tells her she’s like a mother and that Frankie has passed on the pearls of wisdom to her life. The other gravitates to her father and anyone else with an ear to listen to her own crumbling doldrums. She’d lump Robert, Guy, and Phil in the line of men she’s willingly given herself to, but only physically. Never emotionally raw and open, always holding back a bit of something for herself in case of emergency.  
  
So why, and how, did Frankie get it all? Why has she seen the unfiltered, the brutal, the kind and endearing? Why has Grace let her see more than anyone else that’s ever come into her life?  
  
_Because I love her_ , she mutters to herself as she rolls onto her side in her empty bed on an empty night. It’s in that unconditional, unending way she hasn’t even devoted to her offspring, her life blood too.  
  
The house moans a little, a sad dirge to fill Grace up with more melancholy than she can almost stand.  
  
So this is what silence gets you. She despises it to its core. Her eyes snap shut tightly and she wills herself to float away. To catch some dissipating olfactory image of Frankie attached to her pillow or meet her visage in a bittersweet dream.  
  
To maybe wake up tomorrow and see her standing on their doorstep.

**********

As a present, she decides to go out and pamper herself. It’s been far too long since she has done so or even cared to. _Since Frankie left._ The thought sticks around more often than not, a sunken hole in Grace’s chest that is incapable of being filled.

When she walks into the nail shop, she’s feeling lower than usual. At the wall, she picks a color and sits down at her usual spot. Sheree appears with a magnetic smile and an attitude that’s infectious. She asks Grace questions, none of them too terribly prying but satisfying all the same, and Grace loses herself in the simple conversation for a while.

Before she knows it, her nails are done and she is feeling lighter.

“Oh, I just don’t know what I’m going to do. My old place isn’t working out anymore, so I am on the hunt for a new spot. Hopefully I can find something soon,” Sheree bemoans, patting Grace’s hand. “I’m so glad you came in. I needed a familiar face to brighten my day.”

“I have an extra room,” leaves Grace’s mouth and she jumps slightly at the words hitting her ears. She hadn’t intended to say it, only thought it, but apparently the filter between brain and vocal chords is frayed or not working at all.

“I thought you had a roommate. That one you’re always talking about. What’s her name? Oh, you tell me so many stories about her, you think I’d remember. I’m just terrible with names sometimes,” Sheree smiles, then stops. “And faces.”

“Frankie,” Grace forces out. _Who doesn’t live with me anymore. Who left me. Who is over 12 hours and 800 miles away._ “She moved to Santa Fe recently and I’ve been looking for someone to take over her space and half of the lease.”

Which isn’t true, not by a long shot. The house is lonely though and having another person existing within the walls of the beach house might drive some of the solitude away, strip the creaks and alienation from being.

“That’s really sweet of you, Grace. I’d love to come by and look at it, if that’s okay with you.”

For a moment she wants to crack the comment, “I asked you, didn’t I?” but instead, opts for “Any time is fine.”

Not like she has anything much going on. Work occasionally, missing Frankie always.

When Sheree moves her stuff in, even with the bounty of pink and fluff, Grace can’t help but not care. There’s life in the house again. And while it isn’t Frankie, the addition of lighthearted warmth heals her a small amount. The gaping wound closes a little, mends with a scar. A reminder of what’s happened but also, a memento of what she’s capable of. Not moving on necessarily, just moving forward.

***************

Out of the blue, Frankie calls one day and Grace feels a lump form in her throat. She stares at Frankie’s photo on the lock screen and listens to the vibrations continue on. Limbs no longer work, frozen in fear and incredulation. Suddenly, she’s bastardizing Shakespeare in her mind.

To answer or not to answer? That is a loaded question.

Her finger moves to slide the unlock button and she places the phone to her ear. Her voice fails her and she doesn’t speak, doesn’t offer a greeting because her heart is pounding and the blood rushing through her ears.

“Grace?”

She feels light headed, needs to sit. The air feels heavy and stagnant and she isn’t sure she can do this, not after all the time that’s passed and what has transpired.

“Grace...are you there? My God, are you in a hostage situation where you can’t speak? Three heavy breaths for yes, two short puffs of air for no.”

She wants to laugh at the foolishness, cry because it’s actually Frankie on the other end of the phone, scream in frustration because she hasn’t heard her voice in almost two months. Question upon question stack again to the height of a mountain inside of her, ones she can’t bring herself to ask but can’t help but wonder about.

“I’m here,” she manages finally. But that’s all. Nothing more.

“Thank heavens. I was beginning to wonder what I was going to do since I may or may not have lost my Panic Alert, which was the only thing I had as a solution rattling around in my noggin’. You know, in the event that you were in a prisoner situation.” Frankie stops a second, then continues on. “Oh shit, don’t tell Bud I ‘misplaced’ it, okay?”

She wants to say she hasn’t talked to Bud in weeks, hasn’t seen him in longer. Nor Coyote or Mallory or Brianna. It’s as if when Frankie left, their reasons for stopping by also ceased. Sure, one phones now and again to check on Grace, to see how she's faring. Every gathering is scheduled meticulously though , like they’re scared to ask her to anything because she’s a wounded creature, incapable of dragging herself out of a corner to rejoin the world.

“He’s got other things on his mind right now outside of our Panic Alerts,” Grace offers.

“Oh, right. The baby!” Frankie gets quiet on the other end. So silent in fact, Grace almost asks if she’s still there but then she speaks again. “That’s coming up soon.”

The pain in her tone is almost palpable. Like a piece of her is missing and she has no way of re-attaching it because of time and distance. Grace knows how it feels.

“Yeah, not long now.”

The conversation is stilted, teetering on the edge of awkwardness and failure. Grace has so much penned up inside that must remain so. She doesn’t know what to do or what to say where Frankie is concerned. She’s standing on the dock, looking out across the water at the green light on the shore. The past beats like a beacon, calling.

“So, tell me about Santa Fe,” Grace changes the subject. It’s a safe enough topic now, even if it still is still rough around the edges of comfort.

Frankie begins, picks up and unravels her tales. Plates do not shift to create earthquakes underfoot. Torrential rains do not fall to quench undying thirst. The path does not become overgrown and incapable of being walked down. The flow of it re-aligns with the grooves they’ve developed over the last four years.

It’s friendly, because that’s all they are. Frankie doesn’t mention anything about before she left and Grace refuses to be the one to breach the topic.

“With everything going on, I’ve been so busy. Learning Santa Fe, establishing myself as an artist in the community, meeting new people,” Frankie lists. “I think now, with things slowing down a bit, I can finally come home for a visit.”

And there stability goes.

There is so much to tell Frankie about her life too, but Grace can only agree. She will see it all anyway if she comes home.

 _Home_. The thing they no longer share. The abode she’s given to Sheree. The walls that contain every beautiful, fucked up memory.

***************

The airport is teeming with people, more than she’s ever seen in her life on a blasted Tuesday. Already, she’s a jumble of tension and listlessness. Parking had been a downright nightmare, having to slog through throngs of bodies just to even get through the front door. Once inside, Grace had checked her watch about seven hundred times, knowing full well that Frankie would not only be late, but fashionably so.

Next to her, a man is holding one of those dumb signs with a name on it that you see on movies. He stands fidgeting, transitioning between feet and sweat trickling slowly down the temple of his head.

 _I know how he feels_ , Grace thinks as she casts her eyes toward the gate. Still waiting.

Somewhere between the banality of the minutes ticking at a snail’s pace, she loses herself in thought and zones out to pass the time. Memory comes unbidden, vivid in its replaying. She is transported back to the field and the touch of Frankie’s lips on hers. To their hands laced together a mile into the sky. To the hotness of the tears on her cheeks and the chasm in her midsection as she awoke and heard only silence in the house.

A touch jolts her out of her reflection, a soft hand to her cheek. Looking up from her seated position, she inhales and forgets to restart respiration momentarily.

In front of her, a shining smear of beautiful contradiction. The outfit is, by Frankie standards, very toned down. Adorning her chest though are beads and the largest crystal turned necklace Grace has ever seen. The look on her face is completely complacent and not indicative of anything harbored from the last time they saw one another.

It’s as if no time has passed at all as Grace stands and Frankie envelopes her into a hug. God, she can smell the pinion and cedar in her hair. The rustic desert clings to the fabric of her clothes and laces with Grace’s senses, enough to overwhelm.

“Sorry I’m late. But then again, you knew I would be,” she shrugs as they disengage from the embrace.

“You said three flights,” Grace chastises with an eye roll.

“When I’m late, I go big. Plus 5 is considered lucky in some sects of Chinese culture, with many things like Feng-Shui and aspects of the martial arts focusing on that number.”

Grace picks up Frankie’s over-sized luggage and thank goodness it’s attached to wheels or she isn’t sure she would make it to the front door, much less the car.

“Neither of which you practice. And not that that isn’t fascinating, but what on earth did you load this down with? You’re only staying a few days,” she asks, exasperated. A painful twinge runs through her heart at the last part of her inquiry. She tries to push it aside.

“Presents! You’ll have to wait and see, no peeking or getting yours in advance.”

Somehow, Grace manages to get everything loaded and navigate her way out of the maze of a parking garage. The streets of San Diego are just a cluttered as the airport and the short drive turns into a longer one, one Grace isn’t sure how to fill with communication.

“You didn’t call me,” she blurts within the first five seconds of entering the freeway. Her knuckles turn white on the steering wheel as she keeps her eyes focused on the road. Absolutely, under no circumstances, can she turn to look at Frankie while doing this.

This...verbal spewage she feels rising.

“You didn’t call me and I began to wonder if I’d ever hear from you again, much less see you,” Grace continues.

Like the wick of a candle being burned out and at its end, she lets things flow forth before they have to slither back into the roles of besties-at-a-distance in front of Sheree.

“I couldn’t, Grace,” is the whispered response, hardly audible over the traffic and thumping of Grace’s heart.

“You couldn’t? How do you think I felt, waking up to find you’d run off to New Mexico without even saying anything? I know I fucked things up between us, maybe beyond repair, but you still could have told me goodbye.”

“I can’t talk about this right now. I won’t,” Frankie warns.

“If we don’t now, we may never. At the beach house is another person who has no idea of our dynamic beyond friends and former roommates. I can’t bring this up in front of her,” Grace explains.

“Then don’t.” The tone is no longer an ominous muttering, instead a deflated articulation.

They do not talk about the hot air balloon. Grace doesn’t mention the tree.

***************

From the moment Frankie walks through the door, Grace can tell she hates Sheree. The pleasure she derives from this is perverse on some level but, damnit, Frankie deserves the shock of it. To see how well Grace has managed to arrange her life, to let it not be a barren wasteland of heartache and feeling.

Yeah, she’s eating cheddar biscuits and dancing because why the fuck not? It’s not like playing it safe ever rewarded her necessarily. Look what happened with Robert.

But then again, going balls to the wall hasn’t really panned out either. It’s gotten her in emotionally stunted phases with Frankie and continues to. That’s why when Frankie grabs her by the floral collar of the shirt and yanks her into the hallway bathroom, out of sight from Sheree, it takes Grace by surprise.

“Are you high? What are you doing?” Grace hisses.

“I’m still fucking pissed about this whole Sheree thing. I know I’ve already vocalized my dissatisfaction about the situation but I’m having a hard time moving past it.”

“Gee, I can’t imagine what _that_ feels like. Such a foreign concept.”

 **“** There’s no need to be a dick about it. I just want to talk.”

“I tried to talk to you in the car on the way home from the airport but all I got was rebuffed for my attempt.”

“That was before I met the lodger! Grace, she’s living inside of my life and I want it the fuck back!” Frankie shouts, but then brings a hand up to cover her mouth. Her eyes are wide and Grace knows she’s thinking she’s let too much go, again.

“I can’t do this circle-jerk with you. You either want to be here, or you want to be with Jacob in Santa Fe,” Grace sighs, intentionally adding Jacob’s name as an extra dig. She looks forlornly in Frankie’s direction. “You have to decide what you want.”

 _And who you want_ , Grace thinks, as she leaves Frankie in the bathroom alone.

It’s not too long after, at the ridiculous scavengender hunt, that it all pours forth from Frankie.

“I fucking hate Santa Fe!” she divulges loudly. “I want to come home.”

There is so much to be done. To tell another soul that the room they occupy has too many ghosts left behind by the old one and she wants to reclaim. To find said soul a place to dwell without kicking her to the curb, both literally and figuratively.

The night is warm and the water of the pool is cool on her feet. Frankie’s shoulder is inviting so she allows herself to lean. Like her spirit, her head feels weary from all that has occurred in the last two days, so she lets it fall and rest in the slope of Frankie’s neck.

When she says “I’m glad you’re coming home to me,” no part of it is weighted with events and things left unsaid. It’s simplistic truth that floats freely from her tongue.

***************

They agree to host their children for a celebratory welcome back evening meal for Frankie a few weeks after the Sheree situation solves itself. The idea seems a way to mark the passage of the goodbye to a new life and the return of the old. To the settling of the familiar, the longed for, the anything but conventional now.

The evening is gorgeous with a light breeze off of the ocean. Grace watches as Frankie sets the table and on the way back in, runs her fingers through the wind chimes with a smile tugging on her lips.

Grace folds the tomatoes into the salad in front of her and basks in the cool air, the calm of the waning hours of the day, despite their house filled with hubbub. Breaking her reverie, a hand ghosts across the small of her back and she sucks in a breath.

“Almost ready to go?” Frankie asks, grabbing for a stray tomato and popping it in her mouth.

It’s the first time Frankie has really touched her, like old times without intention or thought. A small graze across Grace, sure, but one that echos firm in the recesses of her being.

It all seems like a lifetime ago that they were at odds, so distant a memory that it takes real effort to remember that what’s happened isn’t a figment of imagination and a wild flight of fancy. With every fiber of her being, Grace would love to tick the minutes away and have a real conversation about what was said between them before Frankie left. To apologize or say something other than being left to dwell in silence.

She’s done it, but it’s been damn hard to go back to the casually flirtatious, best friend relationship they had before she ripped caution out of her vocabulary and lept.

“You can take it to the back,” Grace murmurs and picks up the bowl, depositing it into Frankie’s hands.

Frankie smiles, shifting the bowl to her left hand and laying her right on Grace’s shoulder for the briefest of moments. Then she spins in her clogs and is out the double doors, enveloped in the chatter of their mixed crew.

Grace follows slowly on autopilot and makes her way to her seat beside Brianna, whose visage she tries to hide from. Unsuccessfully.

Brianna cocks her head to the side and stares at Grace while the various conversations go on around them. Watches as Grace grabs her martini class and casts her eyes downward, avoiding.

“Mommy…”

“Dammit, Brianna. Don’t start. Not now,” Grace waves a hand, trying to get her to drop what she knows is so blatantly etched on her face.

Brianna, the least affectionate person in the world, latches onto Grace’s side with a vice grip and rests her chin on Grace’s shoulder. The look on her face is mischievous as hell and it would be a blessing if it weren’t a curse that her daughter picks up on her moods with the scent of a bloodhound.

“Either share or I’m going to bring it up loudly in front of this whole table full of people who, right now, are focused on other points of interest,” she encourages with mirth in her tone, clearly gleeful of her ultimatum.

“Why must there be anything to share? Why does something have to be wrong here?” Grace scolds, deflects.

“While you aren’t necessarily one to spring forth into group conversation, you usually don’t shrink from it either. Which is clearly what you’re doing.”

Grace can’t help but look in Frankie’s direction, noticing the laugh lines that appear on her cheeks when she’s tickled or happy. How the breeze gently moves her hair like a ripple on water or how her eyes twinkle in the lights of the stupid tiki torches she insisted on getting for tonight’s festivities. Every emotion slams anew, hard, and she feels like she’s falling in love with her all over again. As if she hasn’t loved her every waking moment of the last few years.

Geez, she’s bad at this. She’s become bad at hiding and bad at self containment. What’s left to do but stand on the chair and all but proclaim the yearnings tucked tight, response be damned?

“Frankie moving back in and Sheree moving back out...it’s been a lot of change. Quick change. But right change,” she admits slowly. Hoping that maybe if she plans her words carefully, Brianna will lay off her line of inquiry. “Maybe I’m feeling overwhelmed but grateful for those changes too.”

Which isn’t a lie in the least. Layered so well in truth, Grace isn’t sure Brianna will accept this bone. If she’s dissatisfied with the answer, she doesn’t voice it.

“My mother, feeling and talking about emotions. I feel so proud of you right now. You’re glowing up before my eyes,” she smiles, genuinely it seems.

“I could say the same thing, daughter who refuses to not dry heave half of the time when the word “sentiment” gets brought up by someone other than our emotionally stunted family circle,” Grace retorts.

She sees a twitch in Brianna’s eye, so slight as to be almost imperceptible. Grace knows she’s been trying to be more open, risking a lot to chase Barry down even if Grace, for the life of her, can’t figure out why.

So far, it oddly seems to be working between the two of them. A thing Grace can’t bring herself to question with her eldest, mostly because her _own_ life choices have been laid to waste by self doubt and realization.

“I’d like to make a toast,” shatters the conversation along with the overzealous tapping on a glass. Grace turns to see Frankie standing with that look, the one she’s seen sporadically through their time together.

“The last few months, I’ve felt like a fish out of water. Unsure of where I fit in and with whom. Coming here again, being in this place with all of you. It made me realize how much I missed it. How much you all are a part of my life.” At this sentence, her eyes burn into Grace.

The focus unnerves her a little, sending her into contemplation about whether or not the rest of the table can read Frankie the way she can. Everything feels uncovered, like Frankie has unveiled a painting for their family to see about what Grace has secretly done and they’re all going to turn and stare her down with inquisitive faces. None of that happens though.

“To my family,” Frankie ends, and they all clink glasses, taking sips of their various beverages.

Grace’s martini lost its punch about five seconds ago but she nurses it anyway, alcohol weirdly being the last thing she wants to partake in right now.

“I’ll go get the dessert,” she announces, anything to retreat and recover. Standing, she takes her glass to refill as well. Even though she doesn’t want the liquid, it might be the only thing that gets her through the rest of the night.

In the kitchen, she removes the cake from the refrigerator. It’d be nice to say she spent time and effort crafting it into bring but who is she kidding? Baking has never been her forte, relying on others to produce any and all confections she provides. And rarely consumes.

“What, are you baking the thing?”

The question sounds and Grace spins around startled, meeting Frankie’s look head on. Her grip on the vodka bottle in her hand tightens and she uses it to stabilize her somewhat as she teeters, emotionally off kilter.

“Um, no. Just...going to make another drink. I think,” she stammers.

“Grace Hanson, contemplating the consumption of more alcohol? Oh, what a day. I never thought I’d live to see it,” Frankie teases. Too easily.

She walks over and slides her fingers over Grace’s grasp on the bottle. Grace can only stare, like she’s forgotten how to be a person who lives inside of the same places Frankie does. Watching as Frankie makes her a martini, she feels lost within herself and the want toward the woman in front of her.

Thoughts of how it would feel to walk outside holding Frankie’s hand, to lean against her in front of their children, to kiss her cheek with the world watching and not think about what others have inside of their minds about them pummel her. 

She feels as if it’s written across her face so inconspicuously, which is why Brianna was able to pick up on her feelings so quickly. Is this her new life now, one where she doesn’t know how to hide what’s inside of her nor control the urges she experiences?

Frankie looks up from shaking the beverage and her eyes lock with Grace’s. There’s something in them that Grace can’t touch but wants to. A sense of longing that Frankie seems unable to vocalize either. Her gaze travels to Frankie’s mouth, remembering the contours of it, the pressure she used when she laid her own against them.

“We should probably get back to our family,” Grace tries to distract herself.

“So now we can’t even be alone in the same room together?” Frankie says in a hushed tone. It makes Grace’s heart hitch.

“Please don’t do this to me. Not now,” Grace pleads, picking up the cake from the counter with one hand and her martini with the other.

Call her a coward, but she beats a hasty retreat back outside, gulping in the salt and oil of the air around them. The crowd is still lively, still deep in their conversations with each other. Grace sits the cake in the middle of the table along with the serving utensil, but makes no move to serve anyone. Instead, she death grips the glass in her hand and doesn’t speak.

“Help yourselves,” Frankie announces and brings forth an item from her pocket. “Anyone care to join me for a welcome back toke up?”

While most of the group shakes their head no, Brianna jumps up immediately and swipes the pot out of Frankie’s hand. Frankie follows with a laugh as the make their way down closer to the beach’s edge. Around Grace, noise sounds but she doesn’t participate and no one asks her to. She watches the embers of the joint flicker in the night, sees the smoke catch the wind and float away. If she were bold, if she were anyone else other than the pouting and confused hull of the person she was, she would join them.

How easily they laugh and connect to one another. A stab of jealousy trills within her and she isn’t sure whom it is towards: her progeny that pokes and prods her to the point of insanity or the woman whom Brianna responds to with more of a mother/daughter dynamic than herself.

Grace supposes that she’s ruined both of them in her own way. One because of trying to control too tightly and the other that she lost control with completely. Mallory is her own separate story, more akin to her father and a total one-eighty of everything Grace has ever been. Brianna though? Brianna is too close to a reflection that she never meant to create.

The evening ends later than expected, the tiki torches giving the last of what they have to give. There is laughter and general merriment up to the end. Frankie, of course, remains the center of attention for most of it and Grace lets her heart feel contentment. Seeing all of their children together and happy that Frankie has returned is a welcoming feeling.

Finally, Mallory stands and grabs Coyote by the arm. “It’s getting late,” she says. “And since my normal babysitter is with me, we better be getting back.”

Brianna, who has been standing off on the beach smoking the joint with a sense of dedication, (which hits Grace that yes, this is a thing she doesn’t even argue against anymore) heavily clomps back up the sand to where the rest of the table is saying their goodbyes.

Bud embraces Mallory and gives Coyote a firm handshake. Pegging her daughter correctly, even if she is the nice one, Grace watches as Mallory offers a small smile and wave in Allison’s direction. Coyote awkwardly goes toward Allison  for a hug, one to which she balks a bit but begrudgingly accepts in the end.

“That was even painful for me to watch,” Brianna shoves by, making her way to the double doors leading into the house. “I can’t imagine how Allison felt. Hey, Barry? Come on. I need something covered in grease to accompany my bake.”

A line forms as they all make their way off of the patio, Frankie making up part of the tail end and Grace as the caboose.

Both follow the kids to the door, ushering them out and delivering kisses to cheeks. With their exodus, it seems a whoosh of energy has dissipated and Grace can finally breathe again. That is until she feels another whoosh, this time of air as the front door is closed and she is propelled backward.

Only this isn’t her body losing purchase on its own volition. She is being propelled backward, backward by Frankie and she tries desperately to not stumble, or worse, fall and break a hip. Once they’re both in the hall, Frankie backs herself against the surface of the wall, hands landing on Grace’s hips.

Grace feels Frankie’s fingers weave into the belt loops of her jeans and she pulls until her body is resting flush against hers. Everything seems to stop, time and breath and life. Existence just floats between them, Grace an unsure shell of the person she was five minutes ago.

“Frankie, what on Earth are you doing…” she begins but is shushed by a stilling touch to her lips.

“Something I should have done a long time ago,” is the answered reply and then, _oh, then._

Frankie’s lips are on her and pressed into her and Grace would love to close her eyes and revel in the sensations. But they haven’t talked, not really. Not about everything before. So now, this all of a sudden upends any equilibrium she has been trying to follow.

As if sensing this, Frankie backs away but only slightly. Enough space between them to speak, yet not enough to stop sharing air. Grace is still too stunned to process what has happened, so sure that this hope, this wish, was too fragile to keep alive and would wither and vanish if longed for.

“I figured I’d be met with a little more enthusiasm,” Frankie offers lightly, quietly.

“Wha? What’s happening here?” Grace manages.

“Tell me you don’t want it and I’ll shit can this whole thing.”

An echo of before. Grace scoffs but doesn’t move her body away from the heat of Frankie’s. She doesn’t retreat to assured safety. She sticks like glue and doesn’t budge.

“So now we are talking about this? Chance after chance to go there and discuss but neither of us getting over ourselves to do so. After me wanting nothing but this ever since that damn field where I poured my heart out to you and you still left.”

She chokes a little on the last sentence, feeling emotion start to well up and close her throat. Honesty has always been so difficult to bring forth in her, tucked like aging secrets so deep that when shaken, it’s hard to dislodge. This is why she hasn’t given herself freely to many. This is why Grace felt bowled over after Frankie’s departure for Santa Fe.

“The universe wasn’t ready for you and I, Grace,” Frankie replies solemnly, truthfully.

“And since you speak so often, now she’s giving the green light?”

“You’ve been burning so brightly in me for so long. She had to have seen you. But she knew as well as I did that timing is everything,” Frankie explains, runs a hand softly from the shell of Grace’s ear down her cheek.

Grace can’t help it. She leans into the touch, so eager for it that she feels wanton. It’s becoming increasingly difficult to have any self restraint, even when Frankie is inviting her to lose it all.

“So now is the time,” Grace murmurs, lost in the potential for great sorrow. And great hope.

“Can’t you feel it? It’s like a magnet,” Frankie says as she lets her hand trail up the floral print covering Grace’s rib cage.

She can’t stand it any longer. This talk, this touching. Refrain has been a bit of her every waking moment for the past few months, maybe even years at this point and now it’s asking to be shattered, to be molded into something worth indulging in.

Blood roars in her ears, her heart beats quickly, but damn, she feels alive as she lets herself fold into Frankie, to capture her lips with her own and press them tightly together. To move against those lips and let everything she’s held back flow freely and openly. It’s four years building and breaking all in the span of a few moments, the equivalent of being lost and found.

Grace lets herself capture again, something she was so sure was off limits after the balloon, internally telling herself to remember this moment and how good Frankie feels against her mouth and how her hand has wrapped around the softness of Frankie’s neck as she pulls her in. She wants to say, ”I’ve missed you. I was so stupid to let you go. I should have said how I feel,” but all of that falls by the wayside as she lets herself have this. It’s beautiful in its fragility and newness.  

Her hands begin to roam, explore, need. She wants to bury herself in this, cover herself with it like a shroud. Everything feels like a fresh bloom sprouting and she revels in it. The billowy shirt under her fingers creates a frustrating barrier but one she isn’t sure they’re both ready to cross, despite dreaming of it incessantly.

How do you ask for the thing you feel you’ve been needing for an indescribable amount of time?

Brakes, she’s got to apply them. They’re important things and with the road bumps they’ve jaunted over, it seems like a time to slow down and rest. Even with the prickle of arousal beating in multiple parts of her body, her conscience says something else: _Do this right._ This could be the second chance she’s been looking for since that field where she felt a little piece of her died.

Her nose glides along Frankie’s, their faces still so close together. Grace would like nothing more than to shed everything she’s got and give it all to the person in front of her. _Patience_ repeats itself over and over inside her mind and she brings her hand to the wall behind Frankie, lets the other fall to her hip.

It’s deja-vu of before and dangerous, but this time the prospect of a desired outcome seems more attainable. As a deviation from the script that’s already been written, she doesn't press her body against Frankie’s in fear and desperation. She doesn’t seek to claim or bind. Instead, she listens to the only thing that matters-her heart.

“I love you,” Grace breathes into the night, into the smooth expanse of Frankie’s skin. It’s untroublesome in its speaking, a straightforward emotion more lovely in its lack of containment. “I think I always have, even when I didn't know it.”

She pulls Frankie into a deep embrace, buries her face in the flow of Frankie’s hair and inhales. For so long, Grace has been thrown into space and floating. Finally, she can tether herself to the one thing that always brings her back to where she belongs.

When she hears her words mirrored, she can’t help but let a tear escape and all of the pent up force leave her. The rock chips away, rubble falls to the ground. What’s left is something wholly beautiful in its shatterable nature, but as Frankie kisses her again, Grace knows it’s something that will survive.


End file.
